Follower By Seamus Heaney

This is the full lesson text from www.skoool.ie for the Seamus Heaney poem Ð''Follower'.

PARAPHRASE

It is a beautiful Spring day. The poet's father is ploughing a field with a team of horses. The wind catches his shirt and it billows like a sail. The son watches his father carefully as he works, noticing every detail. He wants to be like his father, to grow up and plough fields with the same skill and ease. However, now that he is a man he realises that at the time he must have been a dreadful nuisance to his father while he worked. In the end he did not grow up to work the land like his father. And now, as an adult, their roles are reversed; it is his father who follows and stumbles behind him.

THEME

Ð''Follower' is a poem about the poet's love and admiration for his father. It is also about the changes that occur between parents and children as children move out from their parents' shadows.

In the first half of the poem the poet draws a vivid portrait of his father as he ploughs a field. The poet, as a young boy, follows his father as he goes about his work and, like most boys, he idolises his father and admires his great skill:

An expert. He would set the wing

And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.

In the second half of the poem, the focus shifts from the father to the boy. Notice how stanza three starts with "I". Here there is a shift into the first person: the "I" voice: "I stumbledÐ'..."; "I wantedÐ'..."; "I was a nuisanceÐ'...". It is as though at this moment the boy has become aware of himself. He wants to be like his father but thinks of himself as clumsy and a "nuisance".

In the closing lines of the poem shifts again, this time the "I" voice of the poet is now an adult. He wanted to grow up to plough fields, like his father, but he grew up and discovered his own passion and vocation. And now that he is a man, the relationship he has with his father is changed:

But today

It is my father who keeps stumbling

Behind me, and will not go away.

Just as the boy once tripped and fell in his father's wake, now, that he has grown up, it is his father who "stumbles" behind him. The roles have been reversed between the two men and now it is the father who follows his son. By the end of the poem we are left with the image of the stumbling of old age in sharp contrast with the stumbling of childhood.

IMAGERY

Ð''Follower' is a poem filled with rich imagery of the poet's father ploughing a field. The poem opens with a simple statement, "My father worked with a horse-plough", and is followed quickly with a striking simile (comparison) between the man ploughing the field, his shirt filled with the wind, and a boat in full sail on the sea:

Ð'...His shoulders globed like a full sail strung

Between the shafts and the furrow.

This comparison also suggests that the ploughed furrows ("Mapping the furrow exactly") of the field resemble the pattern of waves in the sea - a beautiful and unexpected image.

The details of ploughing a field are written from the observant eye of the young Heaney, although, of course, the poem was written many years later. If we look closely at how the details of ploughing are described, we can see how much the poet admires the precision and accuracy of these actions. The older man's character and expertise are admired and every action is lovingly outlined. It is this attention to detail that makes the images rich and memorable.

His eye

Narrowed and angled at the ground,

Mapping the furrow exactly.

In the fourth stanza the poem moves from description of his father as he ploughs, to give us an image of the boy (the poet) following his father as he works:

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,

Fell sometimes on the polished sod;

The boy wants to grow up to be like his father, to be an "expert". He idolises him, follows him as he ploughs and as he works around the farm. In the last stanza the poet, looking back at himself as a boy, realises that he must have been a "nuisance" ("tripping, falling, / Yapping always") to his father as he tried to do his work.

The last three lines of the poem mark another dramatic shift: the tense moves to the present with the word "today". Today, the poet is a grown man, no longer the boy following his father as he ploughs. And now that he's a man, an "expert" in his own right, writing poems with the same care and attention to detail as his father ploughs a field. In a clever reversal of the central image of the boy following his father as he works, in the final lines, it is the father who now follows his son.

But today

It is my father who keeps stumbling

Behind me and will not go away.

The poet, of course, does not mean this literally. It is a metaphor for the changing nature of his relationship with his father. The word "stumbling" here may also hints that the poet's father has grown old and, just as children are dependent on their parents when they are young, sometimes elderly parents become dependent on their children.

ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE

ONOMATOPOEIA:

As you know onomatopoeia occurs when the sound of a word imitates the thing it describes. In Ð''Follower' the poet uses onomatopoeic words to capture the details of his father as he works the plough. At the end of the first stanza he describes him leading the team of plough-horses, instructing them with his "clicking tongue". In the second stanza his father guides the horses with "a single pluck / Of Rains". It is interesting that the onomatopoeia here emphasises the great skill with which the poet's father controls and guides his horses. It shows again his "expertise" and ease with the animals as he ploughs the field