‘Follower’ is a poem which has a regular rhyming scheme for example “strung” rhymes with “tongue”, “round” rhymes with “ground” and so on. Unlike Follower, Digging has an irregular rhyming scheme, apart from verse one and two the others are all blank verses. In the beginning of both poems Heaney is showing the professionalism of a writer in Digging and a farmer in Follower “Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests: snug as a gun”, “His shoulders globed like a full sail strung”, “The horses strained at his clicking tongue”, “An expert”. These are metaphors that create aural imageries to help us visualize what is there. A pen is compared to a gun to show how fast he can write and the motion of his father’s shoulder has been compared to a full sail strung. In both poems Heaney shows that he admires his dad for his skills “ All I ever did was follow in his broad shadow”, “a clean rasping sound When the Spade sinks into gravelly ground My father digging”.
‘Digging’ is a poem full of metaphorical similarity between himself, his father and his grandfather. In Digging he showed that he wanted to continue the long lasting family tradition but his real talents lies within his mind “He rooted out tall tops” this metaphorically means that his father is following the long lasting root of tradition like Heaney he also followed the tradition by digging into his roots of memories of childhood. However Follower is a poem full of contrasts both metaphorically and literally of himself and his father. The mature and skilled working father contrasts the immaturity of Heaney as a little boy “with a single pluck of the reins, the sweating team turned around”, “I was a nuisance, tripling, falling, yapping always”. Although they have little in common they have a sentimental bond between a father and son that’s why when his father gets old, he is the one that follows Heaney "sometimes he rode me on his back”, “It is my father who keeps stumbling behind me, and will not go away”.
In the poem, ‘Follower’ Heaney tells us that he wants to become a farmer when he grew up, this is the total opposite of what he really became when we learn that he actually grew up to become a writer and a poet. “I wanted to grow up and plough”, “Between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests I’ll dig with it”. In both Digging and Follower Heaney uses onomatopoeia and verbally energetic words such as “Nicking”, “slicing”, “gravelly ground”, “yapping” and “clicking”. In the poem follower his father’s motion and skills are compared to nautical terms to again help us visualize how smooth his father’s skills are, as in digging onomatopoeia words and alliteration is used to create aural imagery to show how smooth his father is “his shoulders globed like a full sail strung”, “sods rolled over without breaking”, “a clean rasping sound”, “When the spade sinks into gravelly ground”.
‘Follower’ and ‘Digging’ is a contrast of maturity and immaturity of Heaney in the poem. But both showing respect and admiration to his father, its when he gets older he realized that farming isn’t his type of occupation. He is a writer.
