Topic Summaries

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GCSE > English Literature > AQA > GCSE AQA English Literature Love and Relationships Poetry Topic Summaries > ‘Follower’ by Seamus Heaney > Annotations
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‘Before You Were Mine’ by Carol Ann Duffy

‘Climbing My Grandfather’ by Andrew Waterhouse

‘Eden Rock’ by Charles Causley

‘The Farmer’s Bride’ by Charlotte Mew

‘Follower’ by Seamus Heaney

‘Letters from Yorkshire’ by Maura Dooley

‘Love’s Philosophy’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley

‘Mother, any distance’ by Simon Armitage

‘Neutral Tones’ by Thomas Hardy

‘Porphyria’s Lover’ by Robert Browning

‘Singh Song!’ by Daljit Nagra

‘Sonnet 29 – ‘I think of thee!’’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

‘Walking Away’ by Cecil Day-Lewis

‘When We Two Parted’ by Lord Byron

‘Winter Swans’ by Owen Sheers

Key ideas to compare between poems

My father worked with a horse-plough,

His shoulders globed like a full sail strung

Between the shafts and the furrow.

The horses strainedat his clicking tongue.

 
 

An expert. He would set the wing

And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.

The sod rolled over without breaking.

At the headrig, with a single pluck

 
 

Of reins, the sweating teamturned round

And back into the land. His eye

Narrowed and angledat the ground,

Mapping the furrow exactly.

 
 

I stumbledin his hobnailed wake,

Fell sometimes on the polished sod;

Sometimes he rode me on his back

Dipping and rising to his plod.

 
 

I wanted to grow up and plough,

To close one eye, stiffen my arm.

All I ever did was follow

In his broad shadowround the farm.

 
 

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,

Yapping always. But today

It is my father who keeps stumbling

Behind me, and will not go away

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