Follower

Seamus Heaney The Follower

The view is from behind the ploughman, the view from which the child would see the action. At a vintage ploughing match in Hillsborough I got material for the image. A competitor, Mr Graham is the unwitting model. The following child is about to plant his foot in the footstep of the ploughman - in his “hobnailed wake”. I followed my father similarly in the 1950's before he bought his Grey Ferguson. The pair are headed Westwards with light from the south and headed towards the Sperrins which have been described by Seamus Heaney;-

“To the northwest of us lay the city, far beyond Glenshane pass. Mountains ghosted that horizon, sometimes like blue smoke, sometimes like beached hulls, but they would be crossed.”

From Heaney's preface to Derry & Londonderry History & Society; Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County edited by Gerard O'Brien, published by Geography Publications 1999.

The Follower was published in eleven Poems by Festival Publications Queens University of Belfast with permission from Faber & Faber Limited to “print these poems from Death of a Naturalist” who first published it in 1966.

"Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started."

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