Key Facts

• Poet: Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)
• Full Title: Follower
• First Published: 1966 in his poetry collection, Death of a Naturalist
• Form: Six quatrains (4-line stanzas)
• Lines: 24
• Meter: “Follower” is mostly written in iambic tetrameter, meaning that the lines consist of four sets of iambs or eight syllables, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Take line 5:

• Rhyme Scheme: ABAB throughout the poem
• Tone: Admiring, nostalgic, and emotional
• Setting: A farm in rural Ireland, where Heaney’s father ploughs the fields
• Speaker: The poet himself (as an adult remembering his childhood)
• Main Characters: The poet and his father