Follower

"Follower" is a poem by Seamus Heaney released in his 1966 collection Death of a Naturalist. The poem is about how he admired and followed his father.

In this poem, Heaney reflects and looks back almost nostalgically at Irish farming through a description of his father's ploughing expertise. He vividly describes his memories of his father's abilities and explains to his readers his total, uncompromising admiration for his father as the young boy he used to be. The rhyming scheme is as skillful as the action it describes and a further note on structure would be the development from admiration to irritation: "Behind me and won't go away". This is a cycle which can be related to all over the world in many different situations. Heaney had a stroke in 1990 but recovered, he did not write about this event.

This poem was included in the GCSE AQA Anthology.

AQA Anthology
Poems from
Other Cultures
Cluster 1
  • "Limbo" by Edward Kamau Brathwaite
  • "Nothing's Changed" by Tatamkhulu Afrika
  • "Island Man" by Grace Nichols
  • "Blessing" by Imtiaz Dharker
  • "Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
  • "Night of the Scorpion" by Nissim Ezekiel
  • "Vultures" by Chinua Achebe
  • "What Were They Like?" by Denise Levertov
Cluster 2
  • "Search for My Tongue" by Sujata Bhatt
  • "Unrelated Incidents" by Tom Leonard
  • "Half Caste" by John Agard
  • "Love After Love" by Derek Walcott
  • "This Room" by Imtiaz Dharker
  • "Not My Business" by Niyi Osundare
  • "Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan" by Moniza Alvi
  • "Hurricane Hits England" by Grace Nichols
Seamus Heaney
  • "Storm on the Island"
  • "Perch"
  • "Blackberry-Pickin]"
  • "Death of a Naturalist"
  • "Digging"
  • "Mid-Term Break"
  • "Follower"
  • "At a Potato Digging"
Gillian Clarke
  • "Catrin"
  • "Baby-sitting"
  • "Mali"
  • "A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998"
  • "The Field Mouse"
  • "October"
  • "On the Train"
  • "Cold Knap Lake"
Carol Ann Duffy
  • "Havisham"
  • "Elvis's Twin Sister"
  • "Anne Hathaway"
  • "Salome"
  • "We Remember Your Childhood Well"
  • "Before You Were Mine"
  • "Education for Leisure"
  • "Stealing"
Simon Armitage
  • "Mother, any distance greater than a single span"
  • "My father thought it..."
  • "Homecoming"
  • "November"
  • "Kid"
  • "Those bastards in their mansions"
  • "I've made out a will; I'm leaving myself"
  • "Hitcher"
Pre-1914
  • "On My First Sonne" by Ben Jonson
  • "Song of the Old Mother" by William Butler Yeats
  • "The Affliction of Margaret" by William Wordsworth
  • "The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found" by William Blake
  • "Tichborne's Elegy" by Charles Tichborne
  • "The Man He Killed" by Thomas Hardy
  • "Patrolling Barnegat" by Walt Whitman
  • "Sonnet CXXX" by William Shakespeare
  • "My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning
  • "The Laboratory" by Robert Browning
  • "Ulysses" by Alfred Tennyson
  • "The Village Schoolmaster" by Oliver Goldsmith
  • "The Eagle" by Alfred Tennyson
  • "Sonnet" by John Clare
Prose
  • "Flight" by Doris Lessing
  • "Superman and Paula Brown's New Snowsuit" by Sylvia Plath
  • "Your Shoes" by Michèle Roberts
  • "Growing Up" by Joyce Cary
  • "The End of Something" by Ernest Hemingway
  • "Chemistry" by Graham Swift
  • "Snowdrops" by Leslie Norris