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Read the poem below and then answer the questions that follow. Follower My father worked with a horse plough His shoulders globed like a full...

Read the poem below and then answer the questions that follow.
Follower
My father worked with a horse plough
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock
The sod rolled heading, with 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 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 a plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm,
All I did was follow
In his broad shadow around 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.

Questions
a) Describe what the poem is about.
b) What is the persona’s attitude towards his father?
c) Identify and illustrate any two literary devices used.

d) What is the mood of the poem?

e) Describe two character traits of the father.

f) What is the irony in the last stanza?

g) Which word can replace ‘yapping’?
h) Identify the two different aspects of the title ‘follower’.

Answers

Peter
a) The poem is about a little boy who looks up to his father (1mark) who is a farmer as his role model. He wants to follow his footsteps/admires him so much that he too wants to be a farmer when he grows up.
b) The persona’s attitude towards his father is of admiration / love adoration. He says. ‘I wanted to grow up tough.’ He wants to do the things his father so skillfully did.
c) Simile (1mark) His shoulders globed like a full sail strung repetition ‘fell sometimes. Sometimes he rode
d) Nostalgic / longing The person remembers the good old days when he used to admire his father’s activities.
e) Powerful (1mark) he appeared powerful and vast to the narrator with his shoulders like a full sail strung between the shafts and the furrows’
skilled he controlled the horses merely by clicking his tongue, showing how skilled he is
f) The irony in the last stanza is that the persona finds his father an irritant yet his father put up with him when he was a boy. (The contrasting word ‘yet’ is key)
g) Yelling
h) The son followed his father
In the later years the father followed the son.
Musyoxx answered the question on March 16, 2018 at 16:55

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