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Summary, Structure & Form

English Lit: AQA GCSE Poetry - Love & Relationships, topic 10.1.1

Summary of Follower

Seamus Heaney's poem explores familial love from the perspective of a child.

Background

Background

  • Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, who grew up in Bellaghy in Northern Ireland.
  • He was one of eight children.
  • He went on to become an English teacher.
  • This poem was published in 1966 in a collection that focused on childhood and this rural, Irish identity.
Summary - beginning

Summary - beginning

  • Heaney’s poem follows his childhood memories of his father ploughing. He admires his father’s skill.
  • The poem continues on as the boy in the poem follows in his father’s shadow. Sometimes, his father is carrying him.
Summary - shift

Summary - shift

  • The perspective of the poem shifts and we hear from the narrator in the present.
  • He wished to be like his father, but all he ever really did was follow him around.
  • The poem ends ambiguously, with Heaney’s father following behind him, tripping and stumbling.
  • But it is unclear whether it is his father or the memory of him that follows him around.
Parent-child relationship

Parent-child relationship

  • Heaney explores the often painful realisation that our parents aren’t the superheroes we imagine them to be as a child.
  • Heaney remembers his childhood idolisation of his father and his inability to match up to his father’s strength.
  • He then suddenly and abruptly undermines this image with the final stanza – in which is father is now stumbling and frail.

Structure and Form in Follower

Here are some key examples of structure and form in Seamus Heaney's poem Follower:

Rhythm and rhyme

Rhythm and rhyme

  • The poem follows a neat ABAB rhyme scheme, and is written in iambic tetrameter.
  • There are half rhymes as well, which gives the poem a songlike and childish character.
Title

Title

  • The title of the poem ‘Follower’ refers to both father and son at different points in the poem.
  • The opening stanzas of the poem focus on the narrator's admiration for his father’s skill.
  • The central stanzas follow the narrator attempting to find his own identity, and the poem concludes with the father following behind.

Test yourself on Summary, Structure & Form

  • Summary of Follower

  • Whose perspective is the poem Follower written from?

  • Features of structure and form in Follower

  • Who does the title of the poem refer to?

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