Key Quote
“"But today / It is my father who keeps stumbling / Behind me, and will not go away."”
Seamus Heaney · Follower
Focus: “stumbling”
The devastating final reversal — the powerful father who once led now stumbles behind the son. 'Will not go away' carries guilt, irritation, and grief simultaneously — the father who was a giant is now a burden.
Technique 1 — STRUCTURAL REVERSAL / ROLE INVERSION
The poem's entire structure builds towards the final reversal: for five stanzas, the child follows the father in admiration; in the final stanza, the father follows the son. This chiastic (mirror-image) structure makes the poem's argument inescapable: the follower becomes the followed, the strong become dependent. Heaney compresses an entire lifetime's shift in a single 'But today', using the conjunction as a brutal pivot.
The verb 'stumbling' — used earlier for the child ('I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake') — is now applied to the father. This lexical echo (repetition of a key word in a new context) forces the reader to feel the reversal physically. The same word that described childhood clumsiness now describes old age and decline. Heaney makes language itself carry the weight of time's passage.
Key Words
RAD — REGRESS
The father undergoes a profound regression from powerful, skilled farmer to a figure who 'keeps stumbling'. But the poem also implies the son's emotional regression: the final line's irritation ('will not go away') reveals guilt and discomfort at having surpassed his father. Heaney does not present the role reversal as triumphant but as painful — there is no joy in overtaking the man you once worshipped.
Key Words
Technique 2 — PRECISE AGRICULTURAL VOCABULARY
Heaney uses expert agricultural vocabulary — 'headrig', 'furrow', 'hob-nailed', 'sod', 'sock' (ploughshare), 'wing' (mouldboard) — creating a world of physical, technical mastery. This specialised lexicon serves two purposes: it establishes the father as a craftsman whose skills are precise and hard-won, and it roots the poem in the specific world of Irish rural farming that Heaney knew intimately.
The father's body is described with the same precision as his tools: 'His shoulders globed like a full sail strung'. The simile comparing the father's body to a sail combines strength (the wind-filled power) with grace (the curve of cloth). The father is not merely strong but beautiful in his labour — Heaney elevates farm work to an aesthetic (relating to beauty) act.
Key Words
Context (AO3)
HEANEY'S RURAL UPBRINGING
Heaney grew up on a farm called Mossbawn in County Derry, Northern Ireland. His father, Patrick Heaney, was a cattle farmer and the central figure of Heaney's early poetry. 'Follower' captures the tension of a son who admired his father's physical mastery but chose a different path — poetry, not farming. Heaney described poetry as his way of honouring his father's world while inevitably moving away from it.
RURAL DECLINE & MODERNITY
The poem was published in 1966, during a period of rapid modernisation in rural Ireland. Traditional farming methods were being replaced by mechanisation, and sons were increasingly leaving farms for education and urban careers. Heaney's poem captures this broader social shift: the son's departure from farming is not just personal but represents the decline of an entire way of life.
Key Words
WOW — OEDIPAL ANXIETY & THE BURDEN OF INHERITANCE
Freud's Oedipus complex describes the son's unconscious desire to surpass and replace the father. Heaney's poem dramatises this with characteristic honesty: the child who 'wanted to grow up and plough' — who wanted to BE the father — has instead surpassed him in a way neither expected. The final line, 'will not go away', carries Oedipal guilt: the son has 'won' (achieved more, outlived the father's prime) but the victory feels like betrayal. Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence — the idea that every artist must struggle against the overwhelming presence of their predecessors — is also relevant. Heaney's 'father' is both literal (Patrick Heaney the farmer) and figurative (the tradition of rural Irish culture). To become a poet, Heaney had to 'walk away' from his father's world — and the poem is the record of the guilt, admiration, and unresolvable ambivalence that this departure produced.
Key Words