What do we learn from digging and follower about Seamus Heaney’s relationship with his father?

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What do we learn from digging and follower about Seamus Heaney’s relationship with his father?

From the poem ‘follower’ I have learnt that Heaney's relationship with his father changed dramatically from when he was boy to the present time. As a boy heaney obviously admired his father and wanted to be just like him when he grew up he would watch his father at work and follow him around asking questions because he was interested and did not understand what his father was doing, I would imagine that he caused quite a nuisance to his father. however now heaney feels differently about his father and considers him to be the nuisance following him around asking questions about what he is doing because he do’s not understand. I think we learn more from the poem ‘digging’ about how ‘heaney’ once felt about his father than we do in ‘follower’. I think that ‘follower’ describes his fathers physical appearance and hard working ways more than how Heaney feels about him. heaney manages to convey the ploughing as physically demanding by explaining that the horses were strained and sweating and that his father was a team with them so he was working equally as hard, and his shoulders globed as though he is hunched over, getting the horses to move to all the exact points that he needs them to go to. ‘Globed’ particularly stands out to me as it helps me imagine that this was back breaking work for his father, he is sweating, aching, working hard to get his job done and yet there is his young son talking away, following him around, asking questions about this work which he dos not understand, being a nuisance, stumbling over the broken sods that he is leaving behind him, and probably keeping him from getting his job done.

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And yet now in the present Heaney with his education and very different lifestyle feels that his father is now the annoying one, he is an old frail man, much different from what he once was. and now it is his father following Seamus around, asking questions about his work, not understanding what it is he is doing. it is almost as if there has been an entire role reversal between father and son and now it is his father who is stumbling behind seamus, however when seamus was young his father probably humoured him, answered his question and even ...

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