Follower by Seamus Heaney

Heaney's work is very much engaged with Irish literary traditions, and particularly their emphasis on land and sense of place. Heaney maintained a deep respect for the past, and his work often nods to poetic tradition—reflected in the ballad-like form in "Follower," for example.

Poem: "Follower" by Seamus Heaney (1999)

Follower

BY SEAMUS HEANEY

My father worked with a horse-plough,

His shoulders globed like a full sail strung

Between the shafts and the furrow.

The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing

And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.

The sod rolled over without breaking.

At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round

And back into the land. His eye

Narrowed and angled at the ground,

Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,

Fell sometimes on the polished sod;

Sometimes he rode me on his back

Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,

To close one eye, stiffen my arm.

All I ever did was follow

In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,

Yapping always. But today

It is my father who keeps stumbling

Behind me, and will not go away

Seamus Heaney, "Follower" from Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. Copyright © 1999 by Seamus Heaney. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.