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Grade 9 Notes: Follower
Seamus Heaney · A Love and Relationships poem on AQA GCSE English Literature (8702) — not on Pearson Edexcel International GCSE (4ET1) · Follower
Follower is a grown child's memory of the father ploughing a field with a horse-drawn plough. The father is an expert: powerful, precise and calm, his shoulders swelling like a sail, his eye narrowed to keep the furrow true. The small child stumbles behind him in the deep tracks of his boots, falls, and is sometimes carried on the father's back. The child wanted to grow up and plough like him, but all the child ever did was follow, getting in the way. Then, in the last lines, the poem turns: today it is the father who keeps stumbling behind the grown child, and will not go away. Revise it as a poem about admiration, growing up and the reversal of roles between parent and child. Notice the craft vocabulary of ploughing, the child's awe, and the sudden shift into the present at the end. The poem is in copyright and no quotation from it could be checked against the poet's or publisher's own text, so these notes quote nothing: every moment is described closely enough to find on the page. If the poem is printed on your paper, quote it from there.
Build your reading of Follower, teach it to an AI pupil, then defend it in a marked debate — this page carries all three.
What is this exam testing?
Follower is examined on one course Incandio supports: AQA GCSE English Literature (8702), as one of the fifteen poems in the Love and Relationships cluster on Paper 2. You meet it in one of two ways — printed on the paper as the named poem, or remembered as the poem you choose to set beside a different named poem. Both routes reward the same three things: an argument of your own (AO1), close attention to how the poem's language, form and structure make that argument (AO2), and context that genuinely changes how a line reads (AO3 — on this course AO3 means context, not comparison). For Follower that means a view about what the poem does with a father and the child who followed him, a set of precisely described moments, and one or two pieces of context — a farming life of horse-drawn ploughs that was disappearing, and, for readers who connect the poem with Heaney's own farming childhood, a poet who did not become a farmer — welded to a moment.
AQA GCSE English Literature (8702) — Paper 2, Section B: Poetry (Love and Relationships)
Section B asks one comparative question on the cluster. One poem is named and printed; you choose a second from the same cluster and write about it from memory. There is no separate mark for comparing: comparison is the task itself, credited through the quality of your argument and your analysis. Accuracy of spelling and grammar (AO4) is not credited on this question, though clear writing still carries the argument. On Pearson Edexcel International GCSE the same AO codes mean different things; never carry them across.
AO1 · A personal, critical response, supported by references
What the examiner wants: An argument about what the poem does with the relationship, not a description of ploughing. The strongest answers ask what the reversal in the final lines means: guilt, care, burden, or a father who lives on in the speaker's mind.
Scoring highly: Range across the poem: the father's skill and strength; the precise language of the plough; the child stumbling and falling; the rides on the father's back; the child's wish to plough; the final reversal. Keep a second poem in every paragraph.
Top band vs the band below: Top answers read the structure as meaning: noticing that the roles reverse is an observation; arguing that the poem saves its reversal for the final lines so that five stanzas of admiration suddenly become a picture of an ageing parent the speaker cannot shake off — and that the word for the father's stumbling repeats the child's earlier stumbling — is a concept.
The common mistake: Treating the poem as a happy childhood memory and missing the shift into the present at the end, where the meaning turns.
In your essay: Open with a comparative thesis that names both poems and the difference that matters, then build three or four paragraphs that each hold both poems, and finish on what the pairing shows that neither poem shows alone.
AO2 · Language, form and structure, with subject terminology
What the examiner wants: Analysis of Heaney's methods: technical farming vocabulary; the sailing simile for the father's shoulders; the child's-eye admiration; the regular quatrains with rhyme and half-rhyme; enjambment; the change from past to present tense; repetition of stumbling.
Scoring highly: Read the vocabulary as respect: the technical words for the parts of the plough and the field show a speaker who honours the father's craft by naming it exactly.
Top band vs the band below: The best answers trace the verb of stumbling: the child stumbles behind the father early in the poem, and at the end the father keeps stumbling behind the grown child. The same action, reversed, carries the whole poem's change.
The common mistake: Saying the poem uses farming words without saying what that precision shows about the speaker's feelings.
In your essay: In each paragraph name the method, pin down the words or moment doing the work, say what it does to a reader, then say what the partner poem does differently. Make at least one point about form or structure.
AO3 · Context — the relationship between the poem and the world it comes from
What the examiner wants: How the poem's world shapes it: a small farm in rural Northern Ireland where Heaney grew up; horse-drawn ploughing, a skill that machines were replacing; and a poet who did not follow his own father into farming — context about Heaney, not a fact the poem states about its speaker.
Scoring highly: One clause at a time: because horse-drawn ploughing was a skill on its way out, the speaker's careful record of the father's expertise preserves a vanishing craft as well as a person.
Top band vs the band below: Context that generates a reading: for readers who connect the poem with Heaney's own farming childhood and his life as a poet rather than a farmer, the final reversal can be read as a debt or a guilt — the father following the speaker through a different kind of work, a reminder of the path not taken.
The common mistake: Paragraphs of biography that never touch a moment in the poem.
In your essay: Two or three contextual clauses across the essay, each welded to a moment in a poem and each changing what that moment means. Never a paragraph of background on its own.
Avoid. Stopping before the last lines. The final reversal changes the meaning of everything before it.
Examiner insight. A strong comparative opening names a method: both Heaney and Causley look back at a parent from adulthood, but Heaney ends with the speaker's father stumbling behind, a presence the speaker cannot shake off, while Causley ends with the speaker's parents waiting calmly ahead across a stream.
If you choose this as your partner poem, carry its shape: four stanzas of the father's expertise; a stanza of the child stumbling and riding on the father's back; a final stanza of the child's wish, the child's following, and the reversal into the present.
The speaker and the figures
The speaker
A speaker who once stumbled behind the father as a child, and now finds the father stumbling behind
The speaker remembers being a small child on the family farm, watching the father plough with a team of horses. The speaker describes the father with awe — the power of his shoulders, his mastery of the reins and the plough, his exact eye. The child wanted to grow up and plough like him, to close one eye and stiffen an arm in the same way, but all the child did was follow behind in the father's shadow, tripping and falling and chattering, a nuisance. Sometimes the father carried the child on his back. In the final lines the poem moves into the present: now it is the father who keeps stumbling behind the grown child, and will not go away. The speaker is admiring, honest about the speaker's own childhood clumsiness, and, at the end, troubled by a presence that cannot be left behind. The poem names the ploughman as the speaker's father but never says whether the speaker is a son or a daughter; many readers take the speaker to be a son, and often Heaney himself, but an essay should rest on what the poem says.
The admiring child
Most of the poem is the speaker's admiring description of the father's work. Everything the father does is skilful, precise and calm.
Key moment. The father's shoulders swelling out like a full sail strung between the shafts and the furrow (Stanza 1). The simile makes the father huge and powerful, filled with force as a sail is filled with wind. A child's view of the father's strength.
Key moment. The father described plainly as an expert (Stanza 2). A single, plain judgement placed at the head of a stanza. The child's admiration is total.
Key moment. The father's eye narrowed and angled at the ground, mapping the furrow exactly (Stanza 3). The father's concentration is precise; his eye works like a surveyor's instrument. The speaker admires his skill and control.
Following and failing
The speaker describes the child's own place in the scene: behind the father, stumbling, falling, getting in the way. The child wanted to be like the father and could only follow.
Key moment. The child stumbling in the deep wake left by the father's hob-nailed boots (Stanza 4). The father leaves a trail like a ship's wake; the child struggles to keep up in it. The image continues the sailing simile and shows the gap between them.
Key moment. The child wanting to grow up and plough, to close one eye and stiffen an arm like the father (Stanza 5). The child's ambition is to copy the father's very gestures. The child admires not only the work but the man's way of doing it.
Key moment. The speaker admitting that all the child ever did was follow, a nuisance tripping, falling and chattering (Stanza 6). An honest, self-mocking confession. The child never matched the father, and only ever trailed behind him.
The reversal
The last lines move into the present and reverse the roles. The father now follows the grown child.
Key moment. The sudden turn to the present day, when it is the father who keeps stumbling behind the grown child (Final stanza). The roles reverse. The father has grown old and needs the speaker as the child once needed him — or follows the speaker in memory.
Key moment. The father who will not go away (Final line). The final phrase is ambiguous: the father as a burden the speaker cannot escape, as a constant presence in the speaker's mind, or as a love that endures.
How Heaney builds the speaker in language and structure
The speaker's voice is admiring and precise. The speaker uses the technical vocabulary of ploughing — shafts, furrow, the wing and the pointed sock of the plough, the headland where the horses turn — which shows how closely the child watched and how much the speaker respects the craft.
The speaker describes the younger self plainly and with self-mockery: stumbling, falling, a nuisance always chattering. The honesty makes the voice trustworthy and humane.
The poem is in regular quatrains with rhyme and half-rhyme, steady like the rhythm of ploughing. The final stanza breaks the pattern of past tense with a sudden present, which gives the reversal its force.
The repeated verb of stumbling ties the beginning to the end: the child stumbles behind the father; at last, the father stumbles behind the grown child.
The speaker in context
A different path. Seamus Heaney grew up on a small farm in County Derry, Northern Ireland, and did not follow his father into farming but became a poet. For readers who connect the poem with Heaney's own farming childhood, the speaker's confession that all the child ever did was follow takes on a deeper meaning: a different path was chosen. Keep this as a reading, not a fact about the speaker.
First collection. The poem was published in Heaney's first collection, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966. Many poems in it look back at a rural childhood with a mixture of love and distance.
Relationships
- The father — The expert the speaker admired and followed, now old and following the speaker.
- The farm — The world of the speaker's childhood and the father's skill.
What The speaker stands for
- The plough and the furrow: the father's skill and the path the speaker could not follow.
- The shadow: the father's greatness and the child's smallness.
- Stumbling: the child's weakness, and later the father's.
Why Heaney made The speaker
- To honour a father's skill and strength.
- To show a child's admiration and sense of inadequacy.
- To reveal how the roles of parent and child reverse with time.
Other readings
- A speaker full of admiration and love.
- A speaker who feels a failure to follow the father's path.
- A speaker burdened by an ageing father, or by guilt.
Essay arguments
- Heaney presents a speaker whose childhood admiration for the father's skill turns, in the last lines, into a troubled awareness of the father's dependence.
- The speaker's honest picture of the younger self as a nuisance presents childhood as a time of wanting to be like a parent and failing.
- The ambiguous ending presents the father as a presence the speaker cannot leave behind.
In theme essays
- Admiration and family.
- Growing up and role reversal.
- Memory and guilt.
Questions that get asked
- How does Heaney present the relationship between a father and child in Follower and one other poem from Love and Relationships?
- Compare the ways poets show a child's admiration for a parent.
The father
A skilled ploughman, admired by his child, who in old age follows the speaker
The father is presented almost entirely through his work. He is strong — his shoulders swell like a sail — and expert: he sets the parts of the plough exactly, turns the sweating horses with a single pull of the reins, and keeps the furrow true with a narrowed eye. He is patient with his clumsy child, sometimes carrying the child on his back as he walks the field. In the final lines he appears in the present as an old man who keeps stumbling behind his grown child and will not go away. The contrast between the powerful ploughman and the stumbling old man is the poem's quiet tragedy.
The expert ploughman
The father's skill is described in precise, technical detail, as only someone who watched closely could describe it.
Key moment. The horses straining at the father's clicking tongue (Stanza 1). He controls the animals with a small sound. His authority is effortless.
Key moment. The father turning the sweating team at the end of the field with a single pull of the reins (Stanza 3). One movement turns the horses round. The economy of the action shows mastery.
Key moment. The father carrying the child on his back, dipping and rising with his slow steps (Stanza 4). A tender moment: the father's strength used to carry his child. The motion is gentle and rhythmical.
How Heaney builds the father in language and structure
The father is built through action verbs and craft nouns. He works; the poem shows him working.
The sailing simile and the image of his broad shadow make him physically large in the child's eyes.
He is given no speech at all. He is known by what he does, which suits a practical man of skill.
The father in context
Horse ploughing. Ploughing with horses was a demanding skill on small farms, requiring strength, judgement and long experience. By the mid-twentieth century tractors were replacing horses, so the poem records a craft that was disappearing.
Ageing. The father's ageing at the end reflects a common experience: the strong parent of childhood becomes, in time, someone who needs care. The poem catches that change in two lines.
Relationships
- The speaker — The child who followed him and who now, grown, is followed by him.
What The father stands for
- The sail: strength and fullness.
- The narrowed eye: skill and control.
Why Heaney made The father
- To show a father admired for his craft.
- To make his later stumbling more poignant.
Other readings
- A heroic figure in a child's eyes.
- A man whose strength fades with age.
- A presence that remains in the speaker's mind.
Essay arguments
- Heaney presents the father as an expert whose strength and skill make him heroic to the child, so his stumbling at the end is a reversal of everything the child admired.
- The father's care in carrying the child on his back is later mirrored by the grown child's burden of an ageing father.
In theme essays
- Admiration and family.
- Growing up and role reversal.
Questions that get asked
- How is the father presented in Follower?
- Compare the ways poets show parents in Follower and one other poem.
The themes
Admiration and family
A child's awe at a father's skill.
Most of the poem is admiration. The speaker describes the father's strength, control and precision with loving exactness. The technical vocabulary is itself a form of respect: the speaker honours the craft by naming it properly.
The child's admiration is mixed with a sense of the child's own smallness. The child wants to be like the father and cannot. The child trails in the father's shadow, a nuisance. The admiration is the kind a small child feels for a parent who seems able to do anything.
The father's skill is shown entirely through action. He is never described as kind or wise; he is described as precise and strong. The speaker's love is expressed as respect for what the father could do, which is often how children first admire a parent.
The admiration survives into adulthood. The grown child remembers every detail of the father's work decades later, which shows that the respect has not faded even as the father has aged. The poem is, in part, a tribute — a careful record of a skill the speaker values and could not inherit.
Use this in an essay. Heaney presents a speaker whose admiration for the father is expressed through precision: by naming each part of the plough and each movement of the work, the speaker honours a skill the child could only watch and never match.
Growing up and role reversal
The follower becomes the followed.
The poem's final lines reverse its relationship. The child who stumbled behind the father now has the father stumbling behind in turn. The parent who carried the child now needs the child, or follows the grown child in thought.
The reversal shows how time changes families. Strength passes from parent to child; dependence moves the other way. The poem compresses decades into a single turn.
What the poem does not say is as important as what it says. It gives no details of the father's old age — no illness, no house, no conversation. We only know that he stumbles and follows. The spareness of the ending leaves room for the reader to supply its meaning, which is why it can be read so many ways.
The ending is ambiguous. The father who will not go away may be a burden — an old man the speaker must look after, or a memory the speaker cannot escape — or a lasting presence of love. The repetition of stumbling makes the reversal exact, which adds both pathos and a sense of justice: the speaker now does what the father once did, carrying someone weaker.
Memory and guilt (minor)
A past that follows the present.
The poem is a memory, but the ending suggests that memory is not only in the past. The father follows the grown child today. This may be literal — an old father who depends on the speaker — or psychological: the father's example, and perhaps the speaker's sense of having chosen a different path, stay with the speaker.
Some readers, connecting the poem with Heaney's own life, hear guilt in the ending. The speaker never managed to follow the father as a ploughman; the father who will not go away may be the speaker's conscience. Present this as a reading, not a fact.
Memory itself behaves like the father in the ending: it keeps following. The vividness of the ploughing scene, remembered in exact detail, shows a past that has never left the speaker. In that sense, the father who will not go away is also the memory that will not fade.
Work and skill (minor)
The dignity of a craft.
The poem gives manual labour great dignity. Ploughing is shown as a skill requiring strength, knowledge and judgement. The speaker's admiration is for work done well.
The speaker's own adult work, by contrast, is never described. For readers who take the speaker to be Heaney, a poet, that craft is invisible in the poem — except that the poem itself is the work. Some readers see the precise, well-made stanzas as the speaker's own kind of ploughing: careful, straight lines laid down with skill. Present this as a reading, but it shows how the poem can honour the father by imitating his craft in words.
Context
Context: the farm and the path not taken
The farm. Seamus Heaney grew up on a small farm in County Derry, Northern Ireland, and became one of the most celebrated poets of his time, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. Follower appeared in his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966, a book that returns often to a rural childhood. The ploughing it describes was done with horses, a skilled and demanding craft that tractors were already replacing.
A different path. Heaney did not become a farmer like his father; he became a writer. For readers who connect the poem with Heaney's own farming childhood, that context sharpens the speaker's admission that all the child ever did was follow, and gives the ending another possible meaning: the father who keeps stumbling behind may be the speaker's sense of the path not taken, following into a different life. Keep this as a reading tied to the final lines rather than a fact about the speaker or the poet's feelings.
Use context in single clauses attached to moments: the father's expert ploughing with a vanishing craft; the reversal with a poet who chose a different life, offered as a reading.
Form, voice and comparison
Form: steady quatrains
Six quatrains with a regular rhyme scheme, mixing full rhymes and half-rhymes. The regularity suits the steady, repeated movement of ploughing — back and forth along the furrows — and the order of a childhood memory.
Half-rhymes give a slight imperfection to the sound, which may echo the child's stumbling within the father's ordered world.
The lines are short and the language plain. There are no long, ornate sentences; the poem moves at a walking pace, like a man behind a plough or a child trotting after him.
Structure: admiration, then reversal
The first three stanzas are about the father's skill. The fourth brings in the child stumbling and riding on the father's back. The fifth and sixth turn to the child's wish and failure, and then to the reversal in the present.
The reversal is held back until the last lines, so it comes as a shock. The change from past to present tense marks it. Everything before it is reread in its light: the powerful father of the memory is now old.
Language: the vocabulary of the plough
Heaney uses the technical words of ploughing: the shafts between which the horse is harnessed, the furrow the plough cuts, the wing and the pointed steel sock of the plough, the headland where the team turns. These words make the scene concrete and show the speaker's respect for the craft.
The sailing simile — the father's shoulders like a full sail — and the image of the child stumbling in the father's wake bring the language of ships into the field, making the father a vessel moving steadily and the child a small boat struggling behind.
Symbols: furrow, shadow, wake
The furrow is the straight line the father cuts: his skill and the path the speaker might have followed. The shadow is the father's greatness, in which the child walks. The wake is the trail left behind the father, in which the child stumbles. Together they show a child always behind, always smaller, always following.
At the end the symbols reverse: the grown child now leads, and the father walks behind, in the speaker's wake and in the speaker's shadow.
Key words and what they carry
furrow: The trench a plough cuts in the soil. The father keeps it straight and exact.
shafts: The poles between which a horse is harnessed to the plough.
headland: The strip at the edge of a field where the plough team turns.
wake: The trail left behind a moving ship. The child stumbles in the father's.
hob-nailed: Boots with heavy nails in the soles, worn for farm work.
Precise meanings support analysis: wake extends the sailing simile, putting the child in the turbulence behind the father; furrow and headland show the father's control of the whole field.
Comparison: the strongest partners
Eden Rock (Causley) is a strong partner: both look back at parents from adulthood. The father in Heaney's poem ends behind the speaker, stumbling; Causley's parents wait ahead, calm.
Climbing My Grandfather (Waterhouse) shares a child's admiring, physical relationship with an older male relative, described through extended metaphor. Walking Away (Day-Lewis) shows the parent's side of a child moving away. Mother, any distance (Armitage) shows a grown child leaving a parent behind.
Grade 9 insight. Compare methods: Heaney's craft vocabulary and reversal; Waterhouse's mountain metaphor; Causley's picnic detail.
Readings to weigh
Another reading. A tribute reading: the poem honours a skilled father and a loving relationship.
Another reading. A burden reading: the ending shows an ageing father the speaker must carry.
Another reading. A guilt reading: the father who will not go away is the speaker's sense of the path the child did not, in the end, follow.
Shock the examiner: what most answers miss
Most answers praise the poem as a loving portrait of a father. Five stanzas are; the last two lines change everything. The father who was an expert is now the one stumbling — and the speaker cannot make him go away.
The verb of stumbling appears twice: first for the child behind the father, then for the father behind the grown child. The reversal is exact, and that exactness is the poem's structural key.
The technical vocabulary — shafts, furrow, wing, sock, headland — is not decoration. It is how the speaker shows respect: the speaker honours the father's craft by naming it precisely.
The sailing simile turns the father into a ship and the child into something in his wake. The child's view makes the father vast.
The speaker says all the child ever did was follow. Heaney himself became a writer, not a farmer, and readers who connect the poem with his life hear more. The father who will not go away may be the path not taken, still following the speaker. Present it as a reading — but it is a powerful one.
Thesis statements
- Heaney presents a speaker whose childhood admiration for the father's skill turns, in the final lines, into a troubled awareness that their roles have reversed.
- Follower uses the precise vocabulary of the plough to honour a father's craft, so respect is shown through exact naming.
- The repeated image of stumbling ties the poem's beginning to its end, making the reversal of parent and child exact.
- The ambiguous final phrase presents the father as a presence the speaker cannot leave behind — as burden, as love, or as conscience.
- By holding the reversal back until the last lines, Heaney makes five stanzas of admiration suddenly reread as a picture of time's cost.
Essay plans
Compare the ways poets show the relationship between parents and children in Follower and one other poem from Love and Relationships.
Thesis: Both Heaney and Day-Lewis look at a parent and child at moments of separation, but Day-Lewis's speaker watches a young child walk away and learns to let go, while Heaney's speaker, who once followed the father, now finds the father following behind — so one poem releases and the other cannot.
- Who follows whom: a child stumbling behind against a child drifting away.
- Imagery: sails and furrows against satellites and seeds.
- Structure: a held-back reversal against a lesson earned through reflection.
- Endings: a father who will not go away against love proved in letting go. Conclude on burden and release.
Compare the ways poets show admiration for a family member.
Thesis: Heaney and Waterhouse both present a child's admiration for an older male relative through extended physical imagery, but Heaney's ends with the admired father diminished and following, while Waterhouse's ends with the child resting at the summit, still in awe.
- Imagery: the father as a ship and the grandfather as a mountain.
- The child's position: behind and stumbling against climbing upwards.
- Language: craft vocabulary against climbing vocabulary.
- Endings: reversal against arrival. Conclude on admiration lost and kept.
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Carry on
- The Complete Guide to Follower — the whole text, told properly, in 21 chapters.
- The anthology as one system: Grade 9 Notes — the themes that bind the sixteen, the strongest pairings, and how to choose the second poem in the comparative essay.
- Follower · All set texts · The 4ET1 specification