Follower by Seamus Heaney: what it is about, its context, and how Heaney uses language, form and structure.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the cluster it compares well with, with similarities and differences.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'My father worked with a horse-plough', 'His shoulders globed like a full sail strung', 'An expert', 'Mapping the furrow exactly', 'I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake', 'I wanted to grow up and plough', 'All I ever did was follow / In his broad shadow round the farm', 'It is my father who keeps stumbling / Behind me, and will not go away'.
Form: six quatrains with regular rhyme and metre that mirror the ploughing, and the reversal in the last stanza.
Context: Heaney's childhood on a farm in County Derry, and his choice to write rather than farm.
Comparisons with Climbing My Grandfather, Mother, any distance and Walking Away.
