Poetry Comparison - 'Follower' and 'The Early Purges' by Seamus Heaney.

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Poetry Comparison

The two peaces of poetry I have studied by Seamus Heaney include 'Follower' and 'The Early Purges'.
Heaney's poems both relate back to his younger, adolescent life. In the poem 'Early purges', he describes young kittens being drowned on the farm. His maturity is shown when he says with perception, "And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown, I just shrug, ' Bloody pups' ". But we are shown that he is still careless now, as well in a casual way by saying “I just shrug”. He is also unsympathetic, and justifies his actions like Dan. He is now older, looking back and changed.
The language used by Heaney also expresses the fact that little was thought of these so-called nuisances. He says they are 'slung' and Dan Taggart describes them as 'scraggy wee shits'. This shows how unsympathetic he was and how the kittens needn’t be cared about.
Seamus Heaney also tries to describe the habitual drowning of small kittens. Again, he tries to use language to appeal more and give us a better personal picture of events. For instance, when describing the kittens, just after their death, he quite brightly says, 'Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead'. Glossy and dead are two contrasting words – ‘glossy’ is a healthy appearance, but its only because the water drowned the kittens, where the word ‘death’ comes in.
Heaney goes on to say 'watching the three sogged remains turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung'. This is very imagery language, and maybe quite disturbing, although I think it adds more atmosphere to the poem, because summer is supposed to be happy and fresh, whereas dung isn’t. And ‘turn mealy and crisp’, which gives the impression that he tried to pretend that he didn’t kill the kittens and that the event did not happen.
A caesura is present in the fifth stanza: “Until I forgot them. But the fear came back”. In this particular occasion, the full stop emphasises a space of time where Dan had no regret of what he had done with no disgust, but suddenly the opposite is true over a moment in time.
A couple of vicious verbs used in this same stanza, are “sickening tug”, which shows that Dan was sickened by things that he had done with his violent actions.
I think that the up until the final two verses, Heaney's outlook is that of a young boy, who doesn't understand why something so cruel should happen. Heaney then shows his maturity again by showing his understanding that the kittens, or 'pests', did actually have to be removed.
In the final stanza, a feeling of regret still takes place where he is trying to convince himself that he did the right thing and that the kittens are better off dead than alive.
Overall in this poem, it is made up of 3 simple line stanzas, where the first and third lines rhyme.
In the poem
"Follower", the voice is of the son. He is speaking about his father who he looks up to and admires. The poem starts with the lines "My father worked with a horse-plough, his shoulders globed like a full sail strung". The image given to us immediately is of a large piece of machinery controlled by a large a powerful man. We are told his shoulders are like a "full sail strung", so straight away I think of a large yacht sailing at great speed and nothing can stop it. I think that the son is trying to portray this, so he has used those words to describe the situation. The next line says, "The horses strained at his clicking tongue". These great beasts straining with effort to the command of their masters with the smallest effort, is a great one. The writer has used a comparison between big and small to create an image of this grand master who controls all he does.

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The next verse starts with a powerful sentence of admiration. It says, "An expert. He would set the wing and fit the bright steel pointed sock." So here, delicate tasks are combined with powerful ones and there is a judgment of strength and then a lightness of touch when, “The sod rolled over without breaking. At the headrig, with a single pluck”, is mentioned.

"Of reins, the sweating team turned around and back into the land." This shows that this great figure that we have seen is the boss and sets them back into the land to do more hard ...

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