What happens in Chapter 1 of Follower?
Seamus Heaney's "Follower" begins with a child's awe for his father, a talented ploughman tending the family farm in County Derry. The speaker vividly details how his father skillfully handles the horse-drawn plough: shoulders "globed like a full sail strung," eyes focused on the furrow, reins looped around his neck. The father’s skill is complete — he could "set the wing / and fit the bright steel-pointed sock." Young Heaney trips and falls behind, feeling like a nuisance at the edge of the field, yearning to grow up and follow in his father's footsteps. The poem takes a sharp turn in its final quatrain: now the father is the one who follows, aging and unsteady, while it is the speaker who cannot leave him behind. This subtle reversal is profound, and the poem concludes without resolution or comfort — simply the stark, uncomfortable reality of how time has shifted.
Analysis
Heaney builds "Follower" around a single, impactful structural twist, with the skill lying in how long he holds off on revealing it. For five of the poem's six quatrains, the verse conveys the father's authority through its own confident form: the ABAB rhyme scheme is tight, and the iambic tetrameter flows steadily like a plough-line. The language is technical and precise — "sock," "wing," "headrig" — rooting admiration in the language of labor instead of sentimentality. The father takes on an almost mythic quality: the simile "globed like a full sail strung" gives him a grand, oceanic presence, while the enjambment across stanzas reflects the unbroken continuity of his furrows.
In contrast, the child speaker embodies awkwardness and repetition — "I wanted to grow up and plough, / To close one eye, stiffen my arm" — with the conditional tense indicating desire without ability. The tonal shift hits in the second-to-last stanza with "But today," a change as sudden as a plough turning at the headrig. The father "keeps stumbling / Behind me," and the choice of the verb is significant: "stumbling" was the child's word earlier, now reassigned. The final line — "will not go away" — denies any sense of elegy. Heaney doesn't mourn; instead, he notes an annoyance, and that rejection of easy emotion is the poem's most unsettling aspect. The motif of following evolves into a reflection on inheritance, guilt, and the quiet violence inherent in generational succession.
Key quotes from Chapter 1
“His shoulders globed like a full sail strung / Between the shafts and the furrow.”
The speaker's opening description of his father at the plough, establishing the father's near-mythic physical authority through a maritime simile.
“I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake, / Fell sometimes on the polished sod.”
The child speaker accounts for his own clumsiness against his father's precision, the word 'wake' carrying both nautical and funereal resonance.
“It is my father who keeps stumbling / Behind me, and will not go away.”
The poem's closing lines deliver the structural reversal — the father now trails the speaker — in a tone that is discomfiting rather than tender.
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Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Chapter 1
- globed
- Rounded out into a large, curved, ball-like shape, the way a sail billows and swells when filled with wind.
- strung
- Stretched tightly and held in place between two fixed points, the way a sail is rigged between spars or ropes.
- shafts
- The two long wooden poles extending from a plough or cart between which a horse is harnessed to pull the implement.
- furrow
- A long, narrow trench cut into the soil by a plough as it moves across a field.
- wing
- The angled metal blade on the side of a plough that cuts and turns the soil over to one side as the plough moves forward.
- sod
- A thick slice of earth with grass and roots still attached, cut and turned over by the plough during tilling.
- polished
- Smoothed to a shiny surface by the repeated action of the plough blade pressing and turning the earth.
- hob-nailed
- Fitted with short, heavy-headed metal nails on the sole to give grip and durability — describing the father's heavy work boots.
- wake
- The trail or path left behind a moving person or thing; here, the disturbed ground and footprints left by the father as he walked ahead.
- stumbled
- Tripped or moved unsteadily, losing balance while walking over rough or uneven ground.