Following Seamus Heaney's "Follower": Toward a Performative Criticism - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2000 by John Boly

"Follower" makes no mention of what happens between its unspecified moment in childhood and the endless present of its last lines. With a single phrase, "But now...," entire decades might disappear into the textual abyss between successive sentences, were it not for the metaphors that intimate how the son's first lesson remained an active force. The father no sooner appears in the poem's opening scene than he drifts into an image taken from a schoolboy's daydream. His broad back becomes "a full sail strung" as it mingles with the new experiences of a history textbook or a master's lecture. The father's back resembles a sail because he wears a cloth shirt. It would be worn loose about his waist for mobility, and thus appear roughly square in shape: a trivial enough detail, except to a student who has just learned that renaissance mariners, beginning with the Portuguese, supplemented their usual lateen-rigged or triangular sails with an additional rectangular sail set on a fourth mast. The greater canvas areas provided increased speed for the longer voyages needed to explore the coast of West Africa. Square-rigged sails were particularly effective on the lighter ships known as caravels, which is why the Nina and Pinta were apt choices for Columbus's first voyage. Almost imperceptibly, then, the metaphor offers glimpse into the faded heterotopia of a schoolboy's fantasy, whose discreet source domain recalls an early rebellion. The invincible father of early childhood turns into a fair wind of freedom, his rocking horse plough into a vessel of grace, and the sullen Derry clay into a beckoning horizon that rounds a narrow field into a sphere of adventure. Sailors "set the wing" of the rigging. The coulter's prow smoothly cuts a set that "rolled over without breaking." The horses' turnabout gracefully tacks "back into the land" with a deck "dipping and rising" in the gentle swell. In its passage the ship leaves a broadening "wake" whose sun-streaked ripples are "polished" in the abundant light.

The beautiful world brought into being through this fantasy's performative replaces the blunt fact of power with an idyllic if impossible state of harmony. An actual ship of exploration, particularly one that might tilt off the world's edge, required a standard crew of drunkards and sociopaths, hence a chain of command with ranks, rules, judgments, and punishments. Columbus's sailors routinely threatened mutiny, and it was mainly his deceit that kept them tractable, for example by telling them that they lacked sufficient provisions to return and had no choice but to continue. Moreover, an actual ship would need to contend with hostile currents and storms, heavy seas and treacherous shoals. Even perfect tranquillity could mean dying of hunger and thirst while becalmed. But the schoolboy's magical craft, like the vessel of Coleridge's Rime when the weather is good, responds to the touch of a benevolent pantheism. There are no rivalries aboard this solitary vision, no suffering or distress, for the death-mockin g Celtic warrior who once welcomed the fate of being trampled to death has since turned into a utopian fantasist. Perhaps the schoolboy had already learned that his father's early lesson would be tirelessly repeated by others, and that he would rarely be given either an opportunity for resistance or a rescuing audience. Yet a grim world can be turned into poetry, and poetry into beautiful dreams. The strategy makes good sense. While commonplace wisdom spurns escapism, practical experience sometimes calls for it. Prisoners of war and victims of torture often keep their sanity by drifting away to distant and untroubled scenes. To an imaginative boy recently consigned to the shot mill of his early schooling, fantasy offers a welcome freedom. No one can meddle in his paradise. It carries no obligations or uncertain consequences. He risks only that his inattentiveness might incur the wrath of a master, though even this would reassure him how little the others actually knew. For the powerless, the resistance of fan tasy may be the one power left.