The Speaker (Young Seamus)

The Speaker of "Follower" is a retrospective, first-person narrator — recognisably the young Seamus Heaney — looking back at his childhood self on the family farm in County Derry. He exists in two time frames simultaneously: the wide-eyed boy who trails his father through the furrows, and the older man who narrates with the benefit of hindsight and the weight of elegy. As a child, he is defined above all by inadequacy felt without shame — he stumbles, falls, and gets in the way, yet his awe is so complete that the poem never reads as humiliation. He is a keen, almost compulsive observer, cataloguing his father's movements with a precision that already marks him as a poet in the making. The detail is notable: he records not just the ploughing but the angle of the plough, the "clicking tongue," the "broad shadow" that falls over him like a sheltering canopy. His self-portrait is one of loving smallness.

The Speaker's single stated ambition — "to grow up and plough, / To close one eye, stiffen my arm" — goes beyond a child's wish to imitate. It is a desire for total transformation: to become his father, to inhabit his skill and his sureness. This motivates the reverent, almost worshipful attention the boy pays to every gesture in the first four stanzas.

The arc pivots sharply in the final couplet. The grown Speaker has not become his father in the way he dreamed; instead, time has reversed their positions. His father now stumbles behind him, and the Speaker experiences this not as triumph but as burden — the phrase "will not go away" carries unease, even guilt, rather than satisfaction. The arc moves from aspiration and wonder to melancholy and a sense of unwanted responsibility, tracing the emotional logic of outliving the people we wished to resemble.

• Watching the plough (stanzas 1–2): The child's gaze is so precise and worshipful that he might be studying a master craftsman through glass. His description of the "horse-plough" turning "exactly" and "the sod rolled over without breaking" communicates a standard of excellence he knows he cannot yet meet.
• Riding his father's back (stanza 4): Perched on his father's back while the man works, the boy is literally carried by his father's strength. This image concentrates their relationship — dependency, closeness, and the father's unconscious generosity — into a single physical act.
• The self-deprecating admission (stanza 5): Calling himself "a nuisance, tripping, falling, / Yapping always" provides a moment of disarming honesty. The Speaker does not romanticise his childhood self; the self-deprecation suggests the retrospective guilt that will resurface at the poem's end.
• The final couplet: "It is my father who keeps stumbling / Behind me, and will not go away." The tonal shift here is the emotional centre of the poem. The grown Speaker's discomfort is palpable — the father's presence at his heel is not comforting but haunting.

The Speaker and his father form the poem's entire emotional architecture. For the child, the father is almost mythological — described in heroic, technical detail, his body "mapping" the field with expert authority. The relationship is entirely asymmetrical in early stanzas: the father represents power, the boy is an admiring shadow. The final couplet's reversal does not negate that original reverence but layers guilt over it. The Speaker cannot celebrate having outgrown his father because doing so would feel like a betrayal of everything he once worshipped.

The Speaker and the horses present a subtler but revealing pairing. The child watches his father control these enormous animals effortlessly, and the horses become a yardstick for the gap between boyhood and adult competence. The Speaker's awe at his father's mastery over them reinforces his own sense of smallness — he is a spectator in a world of managed, purposeful power.