The Full Text of “Follower”
The Full Text of “Follower”
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“Follower” Introduction
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Seamus Heaney's "Follower" appears in his first major poetry collection, Death of a Naturalist, which was published in 1966 and brought the young poet a great deal of critical attention. The volume is understood to be a largely autobiographical meditation on Heaney's childhood in County Derry, Northern Ireland. Like Heaney, the speaker in "Follower" is a farmer’s son who finds beauty and value in traditional farming practices but struggles to take them up himself. The poem touches on themes that appear throughout Heaney’s work, such as family dynamics, agricultural work, and Irish identity.
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“Follower” Summary
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The speaker's father used a traditional walking plow, drawn by two horses, to cultivate their family farm. He rounded his shoulders as he guided the plow, in such a way that his body looked like a sail fastened at one end to the beams that brace the plow's handles and at the other end to the trench that he was cutting into the earth. The horses worked hard to keep up with his voice commands.
The speaker's father had mastered this practice. He would adjust the "winged" portion of the main share, or cutting edge, so that it ran parallel to the ground, ensuring that the soil would be level as the blade turned it, and position the plow's shiny steel point so that it cut precise furrows into the ground. The soil was upended in a smooth, circular motion, leaving behind an unbroken segment of turned over land, rather than uneven, broken up clumps of earth.
At the strip of unplowed land at either end of the field, the speaker's father was able to turn the horses, who were sweating from the strenuous work, around to begin a new furrow by simply giving their reins one brief tug. He closed one eye and used the other to trace the land in front of him, charting its precise measurements so that he might adjust his plow accordingly.
The speaker moved clumsily in his father's trail, which was studded with imprints from the heavy-duty nails that reinforced his father's work boots. From time to time the speaker would fall, disturbing the perfectly cultivated soil that his father had just plowed. Sometimes the speaker's father would pick him up and place him on his back so that he could feel the rising and falling cadence of his father's movements.
When the speaker was a boy, he, too, wanted to be a farmer when he grew up and envisioned himself closing one eye and holding his arm out firmly to guide the plow, as his father had done. However, the speaker only trailed behind his father as he farmed, never taking up the practice himself.
The speaker was bothersome as a boy. He would talk incessantly and was always losing his footing and falling onto the soil. But now that both men have aged, it is the speaker's father who is constantly and clumsily trailing him, and will not leave his shadow.
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“Follower” Themes
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The Relationship Between Parents and Children
“Follower” tracks the way that the relationship between parents and their children changes over time. The speaker begins the poem with deep admiration and respect for his father, contrasting his father’s exceptional farming skills with his own stumbling ineptitude as he follows behind. But by the poem’s end, there’s been a major role reversal: the final lines reveal that the speaker’s father, having grown weak with age, eventually trails behind the speaker. In this way, “Follower” establishes a father-son dynamic of custodian and dependent (respectively) only to flip those roles on their heads. In doing so, the poem suggests that there is an inevitable transfer of leadership and responsibility from one generation to the next.
When describing his childhood, the speaker juxtaposes his father’s agricultural mastery with his own incompetence. This sets up a family dynamic in which the speaker’s father is a dominant, guiding force for his son. The speaker foregrounds his father’s physical strength throughout much of the poem, using words like “strain” and “sweating” to convey that ploughing is strenuous, back-breaking work. The speaker’s father is also technically skilled— “an expert” who “exactly” surveys land and adjusts his rig to create precise furrows. The speaker, on the other hand, is a clumsy and disruptive child. He falls, disturbing the pristine soil that his father has freshly ploughed, and describes himself as “a nuisance, tripping, falling, / Yapping always."
By highlighting his inability to replicate his father's methods and suggesting that his father works effortlessly, the speaker creates an atmosphere of childlike awe. This, in turn, reinforces their father-son, leader-follower dynamic. Furthermore, the speaker closely follows his father’s motions, first through observation and then by walking in his “wake” or trail. The speaker’s father periodically lifts him up to place him “on his back” so that the speaker can feel the cadence of his father’s steps, “dipping and rising to his plod.” In these ways, the speaker’s father literally determines his son’s movements, reaffirming his authority over the speaker.
At the poem’s conclusion, however, the reader learns that the speaker’s father has lost his dominance and now follows his son, who assumes the leadership role. In the poem’s final stanza, the speaker reveals that eventually “it is [his] father who keeps stumbling / behind [him].” As the speaker’s father weakens with age, he becomes reliant on his son, in a reversal of caretaker roles. The speaker even says that he cannot “get rid” of his father, who “keeps stumbling”—indicating a permanent shift in leadership, especially as this is the image that lingers at the poem’s conclusion. The awe and respect that the speaker earlier possessed seem to have been replaced by vague annoyance, or perhaps simply sadness at the fact that the speaker's father is no longer the man he once was.
Furthermore, the recycles the word “stumble”—first used earlier in the poem by the speaker to describe himself as an inept child—to describe his father's movements. The speaker’s path, down which his father follows him, diverges from the farming tradition, and his father clearly struggles to keep up. In this way, as his father’s role diminishes, the speaker’s own disposition naturally begins to define their familial identity. As a whole, then, their story exemplifies the inevitable transfer of familial stewardship from one generation to the next.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-24
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The Virtue and Nobility of Farming
Like many young men born in mid-20th-century Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney grew up on a farm and was expected to carry on the farming traditions of his father but failed to do so. He shares these traits with the poem’s speaker, who celebrates such traditions and immortalizes them in verse. Thus, although the speaker does not practice traditional farming methods, he showcases their beauty and deems them worthy of preservation.
As the speaker details his father’s plowing method, he dignifies and idealizes agricultural work. The speaker uses nautical imagery to describe his father, beginning in line 2, where the speaker describes his father’s shoulders as “globed like a full sail.” The combination of “globed” and “shoulders” recalls Atlas, the iconic, muscular Greek god tasked with carrying the world on his back. This image puts the speaker’s father on the same plane as a deity, ennobling him and his task. Other maritime language such as “breaking” and “dipping and rising” call to mind the waves of the ocean, likening the speaker’s father to a formidable ship who effortlessly glides through the water, leaving perfectly tilled soil in his “wake.”
The speaker’s perspective as a captivated young boy creates an atmosphere of blind admiration, further uplifting his father. The speaker is clumsy and watches mesmerized as his father works with precision—his soil “polished” and his movements “exact”—becoming a superhuman ideal that the speaker can aspire to. Indeed, the speaker dreams of being like his father, expressing a desire to “grow up and plough.” The speaker does not illustrate his veneration through one specific anecdote or moment in time from his childhood. Instead, he assembles a patchwork of fragmented memories, cherry-picking his father’s finest shows of strength to establish that his mastery is enduring—practiced at many different points in time. The use of words like “would” and “sometimes” also suggest that the actions described are repeated frequently. In this way, the speaker signals that their familial farming traditions are deep-rooted and long-held, further legitimizing and dignifying this type of labor.
By recounting the story of a son who fails to sustain patrilineal farming traditions, “Follower” suggests that such traditions are at risk of being lost. At the same time, the poem immortalizes them in verse, implicitly arguing that they shouldn't be forgotten. Over time, the speaker’s father grows weak and is no longer able to plough—and therefore no longer able to sustain the tradition on his own. It becomes clear that the tradition’s preservation hinges on the speaker taking it up. And when he fails to do so, proclaiming that “all [he] ever did was follow,” the endangerment of this agricultural way of life becomes even more pronounced.
The sense of endangerment, though, is part of what spurs the speaker to reflect on and capture these agricultural traditions in verse. The speaker uses a barrage of specialized terms throughout the poem— “shafts,” “furrow,” “steel-pointed sock,” and “headrig,” to name a few. These terms are obscure to anyone who isn’t well-educated in the plowing process. Therefore, the poem requires readers to familiarize themselves with the tradition, ensuring that a certain level of understanding will survive over time in readers’ minds.
Finally, the act of plowing dominates the poem’s events and images. It serves as the sole lens through which the reader can understand the characters or make inferences about their mindsets and wider life experiences. Thus, the poem manifests a reality for many Irish families throughout history—farming isn’t simply a practical procedure but also an identity and a way of life. “Follower” immortalizes this perspective in poetry, insisting that farming is a valid, useful framework for understanding and exploring the world.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-24
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Follower”
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Lines 1-3
My father worked ...
... and the furrow.The speaker opens "Follower" with a plain and direct statement that communicates his father's profession, which he will go on to detail in the coming lines. He specifies that his father uses a "horse-plough," an old-school horse-drawn farming tool that cuts long, narrow furrows, or trenches, into the earth, turning the soil over in preparation for planting and growing crops.
This poem, like the others that comprise Heaney's first major collection, Death of a Naturalist, is understood to be predominantly autobiographical. Heaney grew up in mid-20th-Century Northern Ireland, when motorized tractors were beginning to overtake traditional farming equipment, posing a threat to the farming traditions that so many families had passed on from generation to generation over hundreds of years. By naming the outmoded "horse-plough," the speaker draws attention to the traditional nature of his father's farming practice.
Next, the speaker provides an image of his father working. He stands, holding onto the plow and rounding his shoulders so that he resembles a sail, fastened to the plow's handles on one end and the ground he is tilling on the other. This is the poem's only simile; the speaker largely avoids figurative language, opting for straightforward statements and descriptions. However, this image gives the reader a clearer picture of his father's stature by comparing it to a familiar image, while also dignifying his father by suggesting that he is strong and capable, like a formidable ship.
The simile also recalls the Greek god Atlas, who carries the heavens—often represented by a sphere—on his hunched shoulders, implicitly likening the speaker's father to a god. The assonant repetition of the long /oh/ sound in "shoulders globed" playfully draws out this reference by reproducing the image that this phrase describes on the page. Similarly, due to the enjambment at the end of line 2, the word "strung" actually strings one line to the next:
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between ...While the poem will eventually settle into a loose iambic tetrameter (eight syllables per line in an unstressed stressed pattern), the first lines are metrically irregular. Each line begins with two iambs and ends with two feet of varying stress patterns. In line 3, for example, the iambs are followed by a pyrrhic (unstressed unstressed) and a trochee (stressed unstressed):
Between | the shafts | and the | furrow.
Although the tetrameter has not yet coalesced into a regular pattern, several other factors are at work to establish regularity and rhythm. Perhaps most importantly, these lines lay out a sentence structure that will repeat throughout the poem, providing structure and consistency. The parallelism is created by strings of sentences and clauses that each begin with a noun—usually the speaker or his father—followed by an active past-tense verb. This simple, no-frills sentence structure makes the speaker's statements easy to follow, and in turn, he comes across as direct and authoritative.
The asyndeton in the first two lines ("... worked with a horse-plough, / His shoulders globed ...") also links two such clauses with a comma to form one sentence, allowing momentum to build without interruption from a conjunction or period. The end-stops that appear in two of the first three lines will be reproduced throughout much of the poem as well, helping to build a sense of rhythmic regularity.
Finally, the sibilance created by /s/ and /sh/ sounds and consonance created by /l/ sounds create a soft, calm tone at the poem's outset that facilitates a smooth flow from one line into the next, while harder /t/ sounds add some pops of rhythm and structure. Here is a closer look at this mix of soft and hard sounds:
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.Therefore, although the first lines are metrically irregular, they still feel carefully constructed and poetic—crafted with tenderness and respect.
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Lines 4-7
The horses strained ...
... over without breaking. -
Lines 8-12
At the headrig, ...
... the furrow exactly. -
Lines 13-16
I stumbled in ...
... to his plod. -
Lines 17-22
I wanted to ...
... Yapping always. -
Lines 22-24
But today ...
... not go away.
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“Follower” Symbols
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Ships and Navigation
While "Follower" is not a highly symbolic poem, the speaker does repeatedly compare his father to a ship. This, in turn, is meant to glorify his father's agricultural labor. This symbol first appears in line 2, where the speaker says that when his father works, his shoulders round so that he resembles "a full sail," his hands tethered to the handles of his plow and his feet tethered to the earth he tills. Fittingly, the speaker goes on to use language that likens the field to the ocean, emphasizing its vastness and drawing out the comparison between his father and a ship over many lines.
First, the speaker says that the earth "rolled over without breaking," recalling an image of soft waves that ripple through the ocean, rather than thrashing against coastline. Then the speaker refers to his trail of plowed land as "his hobnailed wake" and describes his father's gait as "dipping and rising." This language aggrandizes the speaker's father by presenting him as a stoic, magnificent ship that weathers the ocean's waves with ease. He is even able to be ridden, as described in line 15.
Furthermore, the speaker's father takes the place of a mapmaker in lines 10-12, when he appears "mapping the furrow exactly." The terms "narrow" and "angle" evoke the triangulation method, or measuring angles from known, fixed points to determine the location of a third, unknown point. Images of devices such as protractors and sextants might also come to the reader's mind, all of which suggest that his father intuitively makes precise calculations as he plows, and therefore has not only the strength and stoicism of a ship, but also the intellect and skill to navigate one.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 2-3: “His shoulders globed like a full sail strung / Between the shafts and the furrow.”
- Line 7: “The sod rolled over without breaking.”
- Lines 10-12: “His eye / Narrowed and angled at the ground, / Mapping the furrow exactly.”
- Line 13: “his hobnailed wake”
- Lines 15-16: “Sometimes he rode me on his back / Dipping and rising to his plod.”
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“Follower” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Assonance
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- Line 4: “i,” “i,” “i”
- Line 6: “o”
- Line 7: “o,” “o”
- Line 8: “i,” “i,” “i”
- Line 14: “o,” “o,” “o”
- Line 15: “i”
- Line 16: “i,” “i,” “i,” “i”
- Line 18: “eye,” “y”
- Line 19: “A,” “I,” “o”
- Line 20: “oa”
- Line 23: “ee”
- Line 24: “e,” “e”
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Asyndeton
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Caesura
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Consonance
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End-Stopped Line
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Enjambment
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Irony
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Juxtaposition
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Onomatopoeia
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Parallelism
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Repetition
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Simile
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"Follower" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Horse-plough
- Globed
- Shafts
- Furrow
- Clicking
- Wing
- Steel-pointed sock
- Sod
- Breaking
- Headrig
- Pluck
- Team
- Angled
- Mapping
- Hobnailed
- Wake
- Polished
- Plod
- Broad
- Yapping
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “horse-plough”)
A traditional horse-drawn machine that farmers use to prepare their fields so that they can plant crops. Plowing (the American English form of "ploughing") cultivates the land by cutting into the soil to lift it up and turn it over. This process exposes helpful nutrients, hides any vegetation that has grown since the field has been harvested, and breaks up hardened soil to encourage draining and root growth.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Follower”
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Form
"Follower" consists of six quatrains, or stanzas of four lines apiece. What is perhaps most striking about the form of "Follower" is the regularity of its lines. On the most basic level, they all look like they are roughly the same length. And with only one exception, each line has four poetic feet. The poem's lines thus appear tight and tidy on the page, mirroring the expertly plowed furrows that run parallel to one another up and down the field described.
The prevalence of end-stopped lines contributes to this effect. Heaney does opt for enjambment in a few notable places throughout the poem, though these moments also reflect the poem's content. Take line 2, where the word "strung" bleeds into the subsequent line, bridging them, much like the plow that the speaker describes linking his father's hands to his feet like the mast that a sail hangs from. Lines 8, 9, and 10 are also enjambed, so the reader's gaze mimics the plow, turning from the end of one line into the beginning of the next as the speaker describes "the team [turning] round" to create a new furrow.
Arguably the poem plays with the ballad form, given that it is arranged into quatrains and its meter is primarily iambic (meaning that follows an unstressed-stressed syllable pattern). While the poem does not use strict iambic meter or alternate between tetrameter and trimeter, as ballads customarily do, its rhythm still mimics the bounciness associated with the ballad form due to its iambic bent. Furthermore, the poem uses an ABAB rhyme scheme rather than the ABCB pattern of traditional ballads.
This adaptation of a beloved, traditional poetic form mirrors the speaker's own take on the farming traditions of his forefathers. Both Heaney's treatment of form and his speaker's innovative preservation of family practices via poetry show respect and reverence for the past, while carrying on traditions in a new way that resonates with a new generation.
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Meter
"Follower" is mostly written in iambic tetrameter, meaning that the lines consist of four sets of iambs, or an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Take line 5:
An ex- | pert. He | would set | the wing
However, the meter is highly irregular, with many lines containing an extra syllable and/or substituting iambs for other poetic feet. Still, due to the overarching prevalence of the iamb, a bouncy rhythm flows throughout the poem and mirrors the tread of the speaker's father, who is "dipping and rising" with his plow as he works.
There are countless metrical variations throughout the poem, but a few are particularly notable. For example, line 22 deviates from the established tetrameter, as its meter is trochaic (meaning the feet are stressed-unstressed) and it is missing a final syllable:
Yapping | always. | But today
Interestingly, each line in the three preceding stanzas (stanzas 3, 4, and 5) has eight syllables. In the final stanza, however, lines 21 ("I was a nuisance ..."), 23 ("It is my father ..."), and 24 ("Behind me ...") have nine syllables, while line 22 has just seven—making its shortness even more pronounced due to the increased length of the surrounding lines. Therefore, a great deal of emphasis is placed on this line, which contains the poem's volta, or turn—it represents a shift from past to present as well as a reversal of the established leader-follower dynamic and a corresponding change in the speaker's attitude towards his father. The formal irregularity of this line helps to draw attention to it as a point of change.
In line 19, each foot is again a trochee rather than an iamb:
All I | ever | did was | follow
This produces a line that is literally backwards metrically, reflecting the speaker's inability to replicate his father's motions, as the line describes. The nearly perfect iambic tetrameter that comprises the rest of stanza 5 heightens this effect.
Finally, lines 11-12, which describe the speaker's father making methodical calculations, are filled with additional unstressed syllables, so they read as soft and nimble:
Narrowed | and ang- | led at | the ground,
Mapping | the fur- | row ex- | actly.Some readers might argue that "at" receives slight stress. Still, this line contains two unstressed syllables in a row, so the effect holds and carries into line 12. The lines that follow, however, abruptly snap back into iambic tetrameter:
I stum- | bled in | his hob- | nailed wake,
Fell some- | times on | the pol- | ished sod;These lines appear rather blunt and lurching as the speaker's childlike stumbling is pictured, providing a metrical contrast as focus shifts to the speaker's movements and away from his father's.
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Rhyme Scheme
Heaney uses the following rhyme scheme throughout the poem:
ABAB
In other words, the sounds that end the first and third lines of each stanza rhyme, as do the sounds that end the second and fourth lines. Sometimes these rhymes are perfect, meaning that the sounds are identical, and other times they are slant rhymes, meaning they have similar, but not identical, sounds. For example, lines 2 and 4 contain perfect rhymes with "strung" and "tongue," while lines 1 and 3 are slant rhymes: "plough" and "furrow." In stanzas 1, 4, and 5, the slant rhymes occur in the first and third lines, so the rhyme scheme resembles that of a traditional ballad: ABCB (that is, if readers count the slant rhyme of line 3 as a new rhyme sound, the "C" in that pattern, rather than just a riff on the "A" sound). In the other stanzas, though, lines 1 and 3 are the perfect rhymes and lines 2 and 4 are slant rhymes. Take stanza 3, where "round" rhymes perfectly with "ground," but "eye" is a slant rhyme with "exactly."
The rhyme scheme is not entirely predictable then, which might subtly suggest the father's skill in navigating the fields he plows. The poem moves nimbly between these various rhyme patterns, just as the speaker's father adeptly works his land.
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“Follower” Speaker
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The speaker in "Follower" is an adult man reflecting on his shifting relationship with his father, a farmer. For most of the poem, the speaker appears as a stumbling little boy who is in awe of his father. But his true age (and resulting removal from that period of his life) serves a few functions.
First, it allows the speaker to use sophisticated language, which helps to implicitly elevate the nobility of his father's work. It also reveals the changes that both men have undergone as the years have passed. As a child, the speaker badly wanted to be like his father and dreamt of being a farmer when he grew up. At the end of the poem, however, the reader learns that he has not realized this dream. What's more, the speaker no longer sees his father as a dexterous, strong man, and instead, he "keeping stumbling behind" the speaker. He seems to find this role reversal troubling or unsettling, as it seems that he cannot shake his father, who he says "will not go away."
The speaker in this poem and in the other works that appear in Death of a Naturalist is generally understood to be a persona of Heaney's. His father was a successful cattle dealer and operated their family's generations-old farm. Heaney's father expected him to take up these trades and maintain their familial traditions, but, like the speaker, Heaney failed to do so. Like Heaney, the speaker in "Follower" ultimately does not follow the path established by his forebears and instead charts a new one.
While it is possible to interpret the speaker as a non-male figure, Heaney's biographical similarities to the speaker and the fact that Irish farming traditions were patrilineal, or passed down from father to son over generations, suggest that the speaker is male, a conclusion also reached by many literary critics. This guide uses male pronouns accordingly, but it is certainly possible to interpret the poem differently.
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“Follower” Setting
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This poem presumably takes place in the 1940s in rural Northern Ireland, where Heaney spent his childhood. However, the poem reveals very little about the setting—only that its events take place on a farm, where fields are plowed using horses and other traditional agricultural equipment. This is a time before more modern farming technology, but that is about all the reader knows of this particular setting.
Where indications of place do appear, they appear in fragments—single words and phrases that describe the earth, such as "headrig," "land," "polished sod," and "the farm." This has the effect of directly connecting the reader's sense of place with the land and its cultivation, which, in turn, reflects the poem's thematic emphasis on farming as a meaningful part of (familial) identity. Furthermore, the one-dimensional setting allows the actions of the speaker and his father, including their impact on the land, to remain foregrounded throughout the poem, as these are the clearest images the poem provides. In other words, the poem takes place, above all, within the relationship between these two men.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Follower”
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Literary Context
Although Death of a Naturalist is among Heaney's earliest work, relative to his long career, it introduces ideas that Heaney continued to grapple with for decades to come. Themes such as family dynamics, childhood experiences, veneration of the past, Irish identity, and the nobility of rural laborers pervade his poetry. He also continued to use both child and adult perspectives in his writing as lenses through which his speakers interpret their settings and experiences. Heaney maintained a deep respect for the past, and his work often nods to poetic tradition—reflected in the ballad-like form that "Follower" riffs on, for example.
It is essential to note that Heaney's work is very much engaged with Irish literary traditions, and particularly their emphasis on land and sense of place. He has said that poets such as Ted Hughes ("Hawk Roosting"), Robert Frost ("After Apple-Picking"), and especially Patrick Kavanagh, all of whose work drew heavily from their native locales, helped him see the virtue of his traditional Irish upbringing, which he had written off as archaic earlier in life. Heaney also translated many works of Irish literature and found inspiration and camaraderie among contemporary Irish poets such as John Hewitt, John Montague, and Paul Muldoon. Accordingly, he was a most consistent and persistent member of the Belfast group, a poet's workshop that he attended from its inception in 1963. Today, countless poets cite Heaney as an influence, as he is one of the most widely read poets in the world, cherished by casual poetry readers and literary critics alike.
Historical Context
Ireland has a rich farming history, handed down over thousands of years through 200+ generations. Plowing technology has been around about as long, and steel plows, like the one used in "Follower," became prolific after their invention in the mid-19th century. However, a shift to motorized tractors began to occur around the 1920s, and it really picked up in the '40s, right around the time Heaney was born. As more and more farmers made the switch, traditional plowing methods were increasingly abandoned, and livestock handling traditions diminished along with them. Irish farming methods are traditionally passed on from father to son, making them central to familial identity. Therefore, during Heaney's childhood, the survival of familial agricultural traditions hinged more than ever on young Irish men practicing and sustaining them.
Heaney experienced a great deal of ambivalence about his role as a farmer's son. Farming did not suit his nature and he resisted its traditions for much of his life before coming to appreciate their beauty and virtue, which he detailed in his poetry, uplifting and preserving such methods in his widely-read verse. That ambivalence, sense of endangerment, and reverence are all encompassed within "Follower," whose speaker exalts his father's techniques while also suggesting that they are in jeopardy, and ultimately argues for their preservation. Like Heaney, the speaker forges his own path—one that diverges from familial traditions and expectations—and eventually both men become leaders, albeit leaders slightly unsettled by this reversal of familial roles.
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More “Follower” Resources
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External Resources
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A Biography of Seamus Heaney — An overview of Heaney's life and work that pays special attention to his early years.
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Seamus Heaney Reads "Follower" — Listen to the author read the poem aloud.
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A Documentary on Irish Farming Traditions — The first several minutes of this video (2:10-6:00) show a farmer working with an antique horse plow. The documentary goes on to describe the tools that replaced traditional plows.
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Heaney's Annotations in Death of a Naturalist — Images of a copy of Heaney's first book, Death of Naturalist, which he annotated. This includes a short annotation of "Follower."
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The Belfast Group — An overview of the Belfast Group from Emory University, which houses the largest collection of Heaney's literary archive, per his donation.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Seamus Heaney
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