'How you fortify your inner life'

 

‘If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.’ – Seamus Heaney

 

Born in Northern Ireland on April 13, 1939 Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th Century.  He authored more than two-dozen volumes of poetry and criticism, 2 plays and numerous translations and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.  

 

A 12-volume collection of his poems titled The Poems of Seamus Heaney, encompassing all the poems Heaney published in his lifetime as well as some that appeared after his death in 2013 – was released in 2025. For Saturday’s Poem, here is Heaney’s,  

                                                              Follower

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at 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 team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hob-nailed 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 shadow round 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.