An Analysis: Heaney’s ‘Follower’

One of my favourite (if not the favourite) poems in the GCSE Love and Relationships AQA Anthology, Seamus Heaney’s ‘Follower’ is a wonderful poem. Stylistically complex and emotionally rich in equal measure, the below represents a detailed analysis of the poem.

I’ve used it in the past as part of a strategy of flipped teaching of the poems, which involves the students reading the poem, reading the guide, and then making initial annotations before we discuss it as a class. I’ve also handed it out as a standalone analysis for added challenge after we’ve discussed the poem.

• This poem is from the 1966 volume titled Death of a Naturalist. The poems within this collection deal with issues surrounding childhood, nature, and identity, and so ‘Follower’ shares a clear thematic link with the wider volume.
• As with Sheers, Heaney is not a Romantic poet, but you could certainly say that he repurposes typical Romantic tropes or images. Or, that he is in dialogue with Romantic Poetry or was clearly influenced by their obsession with the natural world. Indeed, this could be said of a lot of the poets in this volume.
• What is the poem about? The speaker recalls his father’s work with a horse-plough with great admiration and respect. He remembers how he would follow his father around and yearned to be like him, but that, years later, it is now the father who follows the speaker.
• In terms of parent and child relationships, there are clear links here to ‘Mother, any distance’, ‘Walking Away’, ‘Before You Were Mine’, and ‘Eden Rock’. The relationship depicted in ‘Follower’ is overall a close and positive one, but there is also a sense that the father has become a burden and so it fits well with all of the above, which tend to depict either an overtly intimate relationship or an antagonistic one.

• The poem’s title is an interesting one and establishes from the beginning the ambiguous tone that will conclude the poem. The lexical choice of ‘follower’ establishes a hierarchal relationship, since, by definition, one person will be following and the other leading. As such, the relationship contains within it an uneven distribution of power. However, the title does not suggest who the follower is.
• However, Heaney quickly makes the answer to this question quite obvious. Beginning with the possessive ‘my’ the speaker seems to take great pride in announcing that the man working the ‘horse-plough’ is his father. This seems to be a badge of honour for the speaker and the tone of respect that continues throughout is this introduced in the poem’s very first word.
• However, one could also read into this first word a sense of ownership: the speaker sees his father as belonging to him and perhaps this also connotes a sense of suffocation. This is an idea that will gain significance towards the end of the poem.
• The next three lines confirm without doubt the love that the speaker has towards his father. The image of the father’s ‘shoulders globed like a full sail strung’ is an especially interesting one and worth pausing over.
• Firstly, the simile suggests that the father is able to harness the power of the horses much like a sail is able to harness the power of the wind. With the image of the sail being tightly pulled, one also imagines the father’s muscles straining, which thus underlines the physicality of the work being undertaken.
• Secondly, and further reinforcing the strength of the father, the lexical choice of ‘globed’ is perhaps reminiscent of the mythological figure Atlas. Atlas, a Titan, was tasked with holding up the heavens and earth on his shoulders. This allusion suggests the raw power and God-like ability of the father, from the son’s point of view.
• Thirdly, there are very interesting aural qualities to this line. The sibilance enhances the fluidity of the line, reminding one its nautical imagery and suggests that whilst the father is physically strong, he is also graceful and precise in his actions. The tonal cleanness of the line mimics the precision of the father. Furthermore, the elongation of the vowel sound in the assonant ‘shoulders globed’ accentuates the size and broadness of the father’s shoulders.
• Side note: Heaney is a genius to have packed so much into one single line!
• It is for good reason that the speaker is so captivated by his father then, but he is not the only one. In the final line of this first stanza, the reader discovers that ‘the horse strained at his clicking tongue’. This establishes the father as having complete control over the horse and the fact that the horse strains suggests that the animal also has respect for him. Ploughing is clearly laborious work, but the horse is willing to ‘strain’ for the father.
• There is also something interesting in the fact that the father clicks his tongue. It is almost as if the horse and the man share a language and as such the father appears to be at one with the natural world.

• This sense of admiration and mastery comes to a head in the first sentence of the second stanza as the speaker describes his father simply as ‘An expert’.
• The short syntax presents this statement as a fact that cannot be argued against: it is an objective truth that is irrevocable. As such, it cements the admiration that the speaker has for his father.
• What follows is a description of the organising his ploughing equipment: ‘He would set the wing / And fit the bright steel-pointed sock’. As with above, Heaney puts sound to very good use here. The repetition of sharp ‘t’ and ‘k’ sounds, as highlighted in blue, give the lines a tone of precision, which compounds the previous description of his father being an expert. Just as the phonetic properties of these lines are clinical and exact so too is the father’s work in the field.
• However, these sounds, often associated with harshness, might also introduce a certain animosity into the poem, which will be discussed in more detail later in the analysis.
• The next line (‘The sod rolled over without breaking’) returns the reader to the nautical imagery used in the first stanza. As with the first stanza, Heaney uses this imagery in order to highlight the father’s skill and his close association with the natural world.
• The second stanza, running into the third, ends with an interesting use of enjambment. With the line ending with ‘pluck’ and then continuing onto ‘of reins’, the lines structurally mimic the movement of a horse reaching the end of a furrow and continuing onto the next one.
• What is significant about this, one might suggest, is that the speaker is so obsessed with his father and what he does that he seems to have internalised and assimilated his very movements into the poetic verse itself.

• This third stanza is also interesting because it includes a perspective shift. Up until this point, Heaney has offered the reader a kind of long distance shot of the father working.
• However, with the lines ‘His eye / Narrowed and angled at the ground / Mapping the furrow exactly’, the poem seems to zoom in on the father’s face. If one imagines the poem as a film then the screen would go from a wide angled shot of the father to rapidly zooming into the eye until it fills the entire picture. There are a couple of things that can be said about this shift in perspective.
• Perhaps, the most immediately obvious is that it demonstrates the intensity with which the speaker is watching the father. It almost as if the father is all that matters to the child. However, whilst the speaker may be focussing on the father, there is also a clear sense that the father’s attention is elsewhere. It seems that the father only has eyes for his work, literally.
• This continues the possible sense that the father and son relationship is not as intimate as one might at first assume and also reinforces the hierarchal power structure implied by the title: the speaker may be infatuated by his father, but his father is infatuated by his work. 

• In the next stanza, Heaney creates a tonal shift by juxtaposing the word ‘stumbled’ to describe the speaker’s movements with ‘exactly’ to describe the father’s.
• At this point in the poem, and for the first time, focus shift from the father to the speaker himself, as signalled by the use of the first person ‘I’.
• There is a clear sense that the speaker thinks of himself as inferior to his father: whereas his father is ‘an expert’ the speaker can only ‘stumble in his hob-nailed wake’. The lexical choice of ‘wake’ returns the reader yet again to the nautical imagery, but it is a very different tone to the precise and smooth images thus far evoked in relation to the father. The ‘wake’ is something left behind by the rudders of a ship and is defined as being very choppy and volatile. This perhaps suggests how difficult the boy finds it to follow in his father’s footsteps: there is no clear path that the father leaves for him to pursue.
• This sense of inferiority is continued in the next line when Heaney describes how the speaker would fall ‘on the polished sod’. That the sod is polished reinforces the father’s expertise, but it is exactly this expertise that the speaker cannot emulate. He instead ruins the sod by falling on it. The father, one might suggest, is marred by the son’s ineptitude and this certainly seems to be how the speaker understands his contribution to life on the farm.
• However, the above is immediately undercut by the next two lines: ‘Sometimes he rode me on his back / Dipping and rising to his plod’
• As is so often the case with Heaney, there is so much packed into these two lines that it is worth exploring in detail.
• The first and perhaps most obvious thing to comment on is that the image is one of a loving and intimate relationship: despite the father’s dedication to his job, he still finds the time to play with his son. This is reinforced by the nature of the game also: the father is offering his son support by holding him on his back.
• In this sense, there are clear parallels to ‘Walking Away’ and ‘Eden Rock’ in the sense that Heaney is depicting a supportive and loving paternal relationship.
• The lexical choice of ‘plod’ is also of interest. This verb has connotations of slowness and a sense of doggedly going about one’s business. The precision and physical prowess the speaker described earlier seems to have been eroded. This alteration is fascinating given that the events described in the poem appear to span a single moment: the poem captures a child watching his father at one particular time. However, ‘plod’, and its disparity to earlier in the poem, perhaps implies that Heaney has compressed years into these few stanzas, which makes the image even more poignant since the bond has remained so tight for so long. This sense of time passing and the ephemerality of life will gain more traction towards the end.
• Furthermore, the passive syntactic arrangement of ‘Sometimes he rode me on his back’ is rather striking. Given that this is from the point of view of the child, one would perhaps expect the sentence to read: ‘I sometimes rode on his back’. One might argue that this emphasises how the father is so central to the boy’s life and worldview. Everything that the speaker does is understood in relation to his father.
• However, these same two lines can also be understood in a more negative light. Heaney’s use of the adverb ‘sometimes’ qualifies the activity by clarifying that it does not happen all of the time. Whilst it is true the image is one of intimacy, in contrast to the previous eye image, there is a sense that it is by no means a frequent occurrence.
• Also, the fact that the boy is riding on his father’s back could suggest that the former has become a burden and is in fact weighing his father down. This is similar to the description of the mother in ‘Mother, any distance’ as being an ‘anchor’ only this time it is the child who is an encumbrance.
• Finally, the fact that the speaker is ‘dipping and rising to his plod’ suggests that the father is still in sync with his activities on the farm: even when he stops to pay attention to the speaker, there is still the echo of his work.

• The penultimate stanza continues to navigate this rather nuanced set of parental relationships.
• The speaker concedes that he ‘wanted to grow up and plough’, which reasserts the sense of admiration that he has for his father. However, in the line ‘All I ever did was follow / In his broad shadow round the farm’ there is perhaps a sense of regret: the formulation ‘All I ever did’ suggests that, in hindsight, the speaker no longer feels this was a productive use of his time. It is as if by following his father so intently he excluded other activities from his life and this was a mistake.
• In the final stanza this undertone of antagonism is perhaps compounded. Heaney uses asyndeton in order to underscore just how many things the speaker did wrong: ‘I was a nuisance, tripping, falling / Yapping always’.
• This being said, the speaker may not be quite as maladroit as is first implied. Throughout the poem Heaney uses language specific to life on the farm and this suggests that the speaker is a competent farmer after all. He has learned more from his father than he seems to give himself credit for.
• The lexical choice of ‘but’, though, signals a turning point within the poem as the speaker admits that ‘It is my father who keeps stumbling / Behind me and will not go away’.
• As such, the roles between father and son have been reversed and it is revealed that the title of the poem in fact refers to both father and son at different points in their relationship.
• However, the ending is ambiguous as to whether the speaker believes this reversal to be a good or a bad thing. On the one hand, their relationship has remained strong throughout their life, but on the other there is a perhaps a feeling that the speaker wants independence much in the same way that Armitage’s speaker does.
• The form of the poem can be interpreted in order to support both points of analysis. Firstly, Heaney employs a regular and steady rhythm throughout, which perhaps mimics the constancy of the love between father and son. This is supported by the ABAB rhyme scheme. However, within this rhyme scheme there are frequent half-rhymes (sock / pluck; wake / back; plough/ follow, etc). This perhaps implies that just as the rhymes are phonetically dislocated so too is the relationship between father and son.