Father son Relationship in Seamus Heaney's poem follower

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.