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.