Themes
English Lit: AQA GCSE Poetry - Love & Relationships, topic 10.1.2
Senses
Heaney uses a variety of techniques to make this an incredibly sensory (appeals to the senses) poem. These help to create an incredibly vivid picture of his memory.
Natural Imagery
- The narrator gives a sense of his deep connection to the natural, rural world.
- He uses words such as ‘sod’, ‘plod’, ‘headrig’ (a strip of land), ‘team’ and ‘hob-nailed’ to evoke a vivid picture of the farming life of his childhood.
Sensory language
- This is also a deeply sensory (appeals to the senses) poem as Heaney builds up a landscape of sound, sights and movements.
- We hear his father's ‘clicking tongue’, sod moving but not ‘breaking’, and we smell the ‘sweating team’ of horses.
- Heaney builds up a sense of memory as far more than just images and evokes it vividly through using all the senses.
Parent-Child Relationship
Follower explores how the parent-child relationship develops as the child grows up. Unlike Walking Away, it does so from the perspective of the child.
Narrator's inadequacy
- The narrator tinges this memory with his own feelings of inadequacy in the face of his father.
- He feels that he is a ‘nuisance’ and worries: ‘all I ever did was follow'.
- He also impresses on the reader the physical strength of his father – he is a ‘broad shadow’, his shoulders are like a ‘full sail strung’. This shows his admiration and awe of his parent.
Ending
- In contrast to the earlier description, the father is now an old man who is ‘stumbling’ behind him.
- This shows how time has changed how he views his father - especially since the narrator had previously 'stumbled in his hob-nailed wake'.
- The ending of the poem is ambiguous (unclear) – the final line states that his father ‘will not go away’. This gives a sense that he is almost haunted by his father.
- This could suggest that it is not his father following him, but the memory of him.
Test yourself on Themes
What setting do words such as ‘sod’, ‘plod’, ‘headrig’, ‘team’ and ‘hob-nailed’ evoke?
What imagery does Heaney use to evoke a vivid picture of the farming life of his childhood?