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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.
AFFECT
confidence
LOVE
CREDIBILITY
Education (working hard and keep going
The follower was writen in 1965. It was published as a part of a collection of poems in "Death of a Naturalist
Majority of the poem the tone is nostalgic and awe of father
Last sentence is Sad and almost regretful.