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  • ABAB rhyme scheme and 6 stanzas.
  • First 3 stanzas describe the father at his work,
  • Last 3 stanzas are when the persona enters the poem and dominates the narrative while the father becomes a secondary character. This could show how Heany`s Father has become the most important person in his life.

The Follower shows us how Seamus Heaney admires his father as a kid. He expresses this with the words, "exactly" , "expert" and "single pluck".

In the third stanza Heaney describes how he gets the horses as a ‘team’ to move effortlessly and how he uses his skills to map ‘the furrow exactly’. Heaney, by comparison of his father he is clumsy and ‘fell sometimes on the polished sod’. He lacks the control and power of his father who carries him ‘on his back’ effortlessly.

The fifth stanza shows how much he admired his father as ‘I wanted to grow up and plough’ and to do the things his father so skilfully did. However he seems sad that all he did was get in his father’s way and followed him around. (He seems sad because he is following his footsteps, instead of creating his own) This feeling of guilt is again brought up in the last line of the poem.

His father has a ‘broad shadow’ to show his size compared to Heaney and the fact that Heaney lived his life in his father’s shadow.

The final stanza emphasizes how Heaney saw himself as a ‘nuisance, tripping, falling, yapping always’ but this is followed by a change as we move back to the present to discover it is Heaney’s father who is a nuisance to him, ‘stumbling behind me’, a reminder that we all grow old.

The final words ‘and will not go away’ seem harsh, as if Heaney finds his father an irritant, yet his father put up with him when he was a young boy, getting in the way. It almost seems selfish, but possibly shows how people do find caring for their elderly relatives a difficult thing to do.

The Follower

Follower

By Seamus Heaney

AFFECT

confidence

LOVE

Father

fIVE THINGS DAD SHOULD TEACH....

CREDIBILITY

Education (working hard and keep going

My father worked with a horse plough,    

His shoulders globed like a full sail strung

Between the shafts and the furrow.

The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing            

And fit the bright-pointed sock.

The sod rolled over without breaking.

At the headrig, with a single pluck.

Of reins, the sweating team turned round

And back into the land. His eye                                   

Narrowed and angled at the ground,

Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,

Fell sometimes on the polished sod;

Sometimes he rode me on his back

Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,

To close one eye, stiffen my arm.

All I ever did was follow

In his broad shadow around the farm.                              

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,

Yapping always. But today

It is my father who keeps stumbling

Behind me, and will not go away.

Seamus Heaney

Born in 1939

The follower was writen in 1965. It was published as a part of a collection of poems in "Death of a Naturalist

He won 1995 Nobel prize Literature for writing this poem

Results

TONE

Majority of the poem the tone is nostalgic and awe of father

Last sentence is Sad and almost regretful.

Analysis

without effort

severe, hard.

Definitions

(difficult ones)

THEME

  • Furrow: long narrow trench made in the ground by a plow
  • steel pointed sock: part of the plow
  • Headrig: carriage and saw used in cutting logs into slabs
  • Hob-nailed: short nail with a thick head used to harden boot soles.
  • Parenthood
  • familiar relations
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