Seamus Heaney & Tony Curtis.

(deracinate / deracination) = rootlessness

The first half of the Follower can be described as memories of the poet’s father.  The second half of the poem shifts a gear to become a haunting collection of personal reflections.  Whilst admiration of his father is the dominant emotion in the first half of Follower, it morphs (?) into guilt in the second half.  Guilt is a prevailing theme in Seamus Heaney’s work. The poem Digging is a particularly relevant example of how the poet contrasts the intellectual and middle-class nature of his work as a poet with the working-class labours of his family. In Digging, Seamus Heaney directly compares his work tool of the pen with the tools employed by his father “Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests I’ll dig with it” and “By God, the old man could handle a spade”.  There is a strong sense of yearning and regret as the poet recalls his childhood ambition to “grow up and plough” whilst the reality was that rather that taking over his father’s role, as he clearly felt he should have done, all that he “did was follow In his broad shadow round the farm”.  The poet sill feels that he is living in his father’s shadow and that he is unable to stop comparing himself to his father and that in any comparison the poet is a lesser man.

The Strongman is a more explicitly and directly affectionate poem than the Follower.  Whilst the use of the third person would usually imply a greater distance with the subject, in the Strongman it suggests that the poet’s memories of the father are still too painful to discuss directly.  The poet describes the evolving relationship between a father and son. At the beginning of the poem the power within the father-son relationship clearly lies with the father.  Another example of the evolutionary theme running through the poem can be found in Curtis’ use of similes.  Initially he uses wood images to emphasise the father’s natural strength and strong roots embedded in the community as his father had a “chest like a barrel with a neck that was like holding onto a tree”.  The wood imagery then progresses to effectively describe the father’s physical decline, as his ageing body is a “frame of bones like plywood”.

Whether the closing stanzas of both poems can be viewed as a contrast is dependent on the individual interpretation of these lines.  It is important to note that the conclusions of both poems sharply contrast with the main body of the poems. In Follower the poet’s memories of his father are inextricably linked with the land that this father worked.  By the conclusion of Follower it becomes evident that the poet has unresolved issues with his father.  The poem successfully portrays the poet’s sense of guilt over his ineffectiveness in following through his youthful desire to follow in his father’s footsteps and he now that acknowledges that he was a “nuisance, tripping, falling, Yapping always”.  The poet has gone through a process of self-knowledge where he has identified that whilst his father was a man of action and deeds who “worked with a horse-plough”, the poet is a man of words and that his childhood habit of “Yapping always” has become his career.  The final line of Follower is ambiguous as it can either be interpreted that the poet is comforted by the memory of his father and is relieved that the influence of his father remains with him at all times and “will not go away”. Alternatively the persistent memory of his father could be viewed as a burden that troubles the poet.

The conclusion of the Strongman focuses on the reversed roles of the father and son.  The original role of the father as the provider and central axis in the family has now disappeared to the extent that it is now the son who not only cares for the father physically but also emotionally as he reassures the father with “No trouble – he said, no trouble, Dad”.  The final likes of the poem encapsulate the indignities of sickness and old age.  The use of minimalist, stark language, without the use of unnecessary adjectives heightens the poignancy of the last lines.

In conclusion both Follower and Strongman are brief but effective poems that successfully portray father – son relationships.  The readers are allowed an intimate snapshot/glimpse into these relationships.  Both poems describe the permanent bonds between fathers and sons whilst also effectively addressing how these bonds evolve.      (1,202 words)