What are the issues of ageing in the poem follower by Seamus Heaney?
The inevitable decline of those we once wished to emulate. As children we can easily hero-worship, we can only follow and understand what we see – Seamus Heaney’s father was obviously a labouring man whose skills lay in his hands, and as a child he wanted to follow in his footsteps. As an adult, he sees his father differently, mainly because aging has robbed him of the things he admired – his strength and his manual skills, but maybe also because Heaney has taken a totally different path to his father, and cannot link to him in any way. That’s all I get from this.
