The follower is a good example of a childhood poem. Heaney writes about how his father worked and how he used to help him. The tone of the poem is nostalgic when he remembers what happened in the past he realises it was better than what he thought at the time. He admired his father as he worked on the farm, and he felt like he wanted to grow up in his fathers shadow. 'All I ever did was follow in his broad shadow round the farm.' You can tell from reading the poem that his father has traditional methods of farming as he uses horse ploughs and other methods of farming. Heaney had an ambition to be like his father.
As he grew older, he seemed to swap roles with his father, which gives a sense of irony, as it was him who followed his father around in admiration ‘stumbling in his hobnailed wake,’ and wanting to be just like him. It is at the very end that Heaney actually became his father, taking on the farm and finding his dad has become his younger former self, ‘but today it is my father who keeps stumbling behind me, and will not go away.’
'Digging' also Shares childhood memories as well as follower. However Digging also shows us more tradition than Follower as Heaney, by watching his father he remembers his father and his grandfather were expert diggers, this shows us that it is tradition to farm their land. He is proud of the way his family is, how they enjoy hard work and have tradition, but sadly decides to break this tradition, 'Between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests. I'll dig with it.'
Death of A Naturalist is also about Heaney’s past as it is a recollection of an incident, which frightened him as a child. It shows childhood innocence through his vivid imagination in the vengeance of the frogs, “The great slime kings were gathered there for vengeance and I knew that if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.” He also shows his childhood innocence though his old hobbies such as filling jam pots full of frog’s spawn and watching it hatch.
Through the exploration of Heaney’s poems we can see that the common threads are family, tradition and childhood innocence. There are many techniques that he uses and this I think is one of the greatest, the reoccurrence of these simple themes, which are left to play on our minds.
