Follower - Analysis

The Reversal Hidden in the Title

The central movement of Follower is from worshipful imitation to an uneasy reversal of dependence. As a child, the speaker trails behind a father who appears almost superhuman in his strength and skill. By the final stanza, however, the father is the one stumbling / Behind me. This change gives the title two meanings: it first names the boy, then the aging father. Yet the reversal is not emotionally simple. The closing complaint that the father will not go away can express irritation, guilt, grief, or the inescapable pressure of memory. The poem begins as a tribute to mastery but ends by asking what happens when the person once treated as an ideal becomes dependent on the child who followed him.

A Father Enlarged by Admiration

In the opening, the father is seen through a child’s awed imagination. His shoulders are like a full sail, an image that magnifies his body and makes him seem powered by elemental forces. Positioned between the plough’s shafts and the furrow, he does not merely operate the equipment; he appears integrated with horse, tool, and earth. Even the horse responds to his clicking tongue, suggesting control so complete that it hardly requires visible effort.

The abrupt judgment An expert captures the son’s certainty. The father knows how to set the plough, turn the team, and cut an exact line. Technical details such as the steel-pointed sock establish that this admiration rests on observed competence, not vague sentiment. Under his guidance, the sod rolls over without breaking, while a single movement of the reins turns the sweating horses. His narrowed eye is described as Mapping the furrow exactly: practical labor becomes a kind of precise intelligence. To the child, the father possesses both physical power and an almost artistic command of the land.

The Child in the Hobnailed Wake

Against this controlled figure, the young speaker appears unstable and awkward. He stumbled in his father’s hob-nailed wake and fell on the newly turned earth. The word wake means the track left behind, but it also carries a faint association with death and mourning. Without forcing that secondary meaning, it helps prepare for the later vision of the father as someone diminished by age and perhaps preserved mainly in memory.

The contrast between them is exact. The father makes straight furrows; the son trips over them. The father directs a powerful team; the son must sometimes be carried. Riding on his father’s back, the child feels himself Dipping and rising with the older man’s steady movement. This is both affectionate and revealing: the boy experiences the father’s strength as protection, but he is also literally a burden. The later admission that he was a nuisance makes explicit what the earlier scene presents more tenderly.

Imitation That Cannot Become Equality

The boy does not merely love his father; he wants to reproduce him. He imagines growing up to plough, narrowing one eye and stiffening his arm in imitation of the father’s practiced posture. But the poem places a painful gap between copying the appearance of mastery and possessing mastery itself. The child can mimic the gestures, yet All I ever did was follow. That phrase sounds disappointed and self-accusing, as though the adult speaker still measures himself against the standard established in childhood.

The father’s broad shadow therefore has a double force. It is sheltering because it belongs to the man who carries and guides the child. It is also overpowering: the son’s identity forms beneath an example so impressive that he may never feel equal to it. The poem’s key tension lies here. Following is an act of love and apprenticeship, but it can also mean remaining secondary, unable to step outside another person’s authority.

When the Straight Furrow Breaks

The final stanza overturns the poem’s established order. Earlier, the father could turn horses with a single pluck and map the ground exactly. Now he keeps stumbling, repeating the child’s former clumsiness. The word today makes the transition sudden: decades seem to collapse between one stanza and the next. Childhood admiration confronts old age without any comforting account of how the change occurred.

This reversal might seem to offer the son a chance to become the stronger figure, but the ending refuses triumph. The father follows and will not go away, a surprisingly harsh phrase after so much admiration. On a literal level, it may describe an elderly parent who now requires attention. On a psychological level, the father remains an internal presence: his skill, expectations, and decline continue to follow the speaker. The son has escaped the physical broad shadow only to discover that memory can shadow him from behind.

The Burden on Both Backs

The poem ultimately resists a sentimental picture of family devotion. The father once carried the child on his back; now the son may have to carry the father through age, obligation, or remembrance. Yet his resistance does not cancel his love. Instead, will not go away reveals how love can survive as an unwanted burden precisely because the bond is so deep.

That ending also changes how the earlier scenes feel. The perfectly turned sod and exact furrows become records of a power that time has undone. The father who once seemed as full and forceful as a sail is now defined by the same stumbling that marked his son. The poem’s deepest reversal is not simply that parent and child exchange places, but that the son finally discovers the vulnerability hidden inside his childhood hero—and cannot decide whether to hold on to him or be free of him.