Following (Leaving Cert English): Revision Notes

Following

Overview and context

"Following" is one of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's most tender poems about her father, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin — a Professor of Irish Literature at University College Cork who fought in the Irish War of Independence and was captured in the Civil War. The poem traces a daughter's movement through three distinct locations — a country fair, a haunted bog, and her father's library — that together form an arc from childhood memory, through a folkloric descent into death and historical violence, to reunion with the father in the realm of books.

The title carries the poem's whole argument. "Following" does not mean pursuit or tracking — it means keeping up behind, trailing after, not losing sight of. It evokes a small child tagging along behind a parent through a crowd and, simultaneously, the adult poet trying to keep hold of her father in memory after his death. The poem folds both meanings into one action.

Stanza-by-stanza analysis

Stanza 1: The fair

The poem opens in media res with the word "So", which gives the scene the feel of a story already underway — a detail in a longer life being picked up mid-thought. The daughter is a small child working her way through a crowded Irish country fair:

Two crucial details:

• "Beasts packed solid as books" — the simile that links the fair to the library at the end of the poem. Livestock are imagined as books stacked tight on a shelf, planting the book-image at the poem's opening and preparing its final setting. This is Ní Chuilleanáin at her most quietly structural: the first simile of the poem is already reaching for the last stanza.
• The father is recognised not by his face but by his clothes — shirt-cuff, handkerchief, the hard brim of his hat. These details are refined, tidy, gentlemanly, contrasting with the rough beasts and dealing men around them. The father belongs to the world of cloth and cuffs and headwear, not the world of livestock — already marked as a man of the library, not the farmyard.

Stanza 2: The bog

The scene shifts violently. The speaker — now in third-person "she", which suggests the poet viewing her younger self with distance, or folkloric storytelling convention — finds herself "tracing light footsteps / Across the shivering bog by starlight". The poem has moved from the daylight world of the fair into an otherworldly, nocturnal, distinctly Irish landscape.

A corpse rises from a wake-house and moves before her. Disturbing images follow — hands of women dragging needles, half-choked heads, mouths that roar:

The bog is therefore doing several things at once:

• A folkloric underworld — the Irish bog as the traditional space where the past is preserved.
• A space of historical violence — resonant with the wars her father lived through.
• A psychological landscape of grief — the daughter's nightmare-journey as she tries to keep following her father into death.

Stanza 3: The library

The final stanza brings an abrupt tonal change. The nightmare gives way to quiet, orderly, almost domestic peace. The father is found in his library:

The poem then moves to its most intricate and most moving closing image:

• "The smooth foxed leaf" — a page of an old book, foxed meaning age-spotted, marked by time. "Leaf" puns on page and leaf-of-a-tree, setting up —
• "A forest of fine shuffling" — the library imagined as a forest, pages rustling like leaves. This echoes the "big tree of the cupola" in "Fireman's Lift" and connects to Ní Chuilleanáin's wider habit of architecture becoming natural growth. The library is a living, whispering wood.
• "The square of white linen / That held three drops / Of her heart's blood" — the poem's most mysterious image. The "three drops of heart's blood on a white cloth" is a recurring fairy-tale motif (it appears in the Grimms' "The Goose Girl", where a mother sends her daughter off with a handkerchief marked with three drops of her own blood as a protective token on a journey). The "her" here is most naturally read not as the daughter in the poem but as a female figure from folklore — possibly the mother, possibly a fairy-tale heroine — whose protective keepsake is now preserved inside the father's library. Memory of one parent is stored within the domain of the other.
• "Shelved / Between the gatherings / That go to make a book" — "gatherings" is a technical bookbinding term for the folded sheets that are sewn together to form a book. The keepsakes of memory are literally bound into the physical body of a book — which lets Ní Chuilleanáin deliver the final image.
• "The crushed flowers among the pages crack / The spine open, push the bindings apart" — the poem's climax. Pressed flowers kept inside a book have become so full of accumulated memory that they are breaking the book apart. The physical object cannot contain what has been stored in it.

Major themes

The father and his death

The poem's emotional core. The father is a man of cloth (cuffs, hat, finely laundered clothes), of books (the library), and of Irish history (implicitly, through the bog's images of violence). The daughter follows him through all three and finally rejoins him in the library of her own memory.

Memory as physical object

Keepsakes — the bloodied linen square, the pressed flowers, the foxed leaf — preserve the dead. But memory is not static: it cracks spines and pushes bindings apart. Grief has physical weight in the poem, and that weight refuses to be contained.

Three-tier structure: life, descent, reunion

The three stanzas trace a mythic arc — a realistic earthly scene, then a folkloric descent into an underworld of the dead, then an afterlife-like reunion. This is the structure of the Orpheus myth, of Dante's Commedia, and of countless Irish folk-journeys to the otherworld. Ní Chuilleanáin is drawing on deep traditional patterns.

Folklore and the Irish dead

The bog, the wake-house, the rising corpse, the hands of women dragging needles all belong to Irish folklore and the memory of historical violence. This is a deeply Irish poem about a deeply Irish father — scholar of Irish literature, veteran of the independence wars.

Books as vessels of the dead

The library is not just a setting; it is where the dead continue to live. The father, a scholar by profession, is at home among books; the daughter finds him there because that is where he has always been. The final image of keepsakes bound into the pages of a book makes the argument explicit — books hold the dead, and holding the dead is their job.

Key images and symbolism

The father's clothes

Shirt-cuff, handkerchief, hat brim (stanza 1) and finely laundered clothes, ironed facings and linings (stanza 3). The daughter knows the father through fabric and refinement — not through face or body. His clothing survives him; so does her memory of it.

"Beasts packed solid as books"

The structural hinge between stanza 1 and stanza 3. Livestock crowded at the fair become books crowded on a shelf. The simile plants the library inside the fair, giving the poem its final destination from its opening lines.

The shivering bog by starlight

The liminal Irish landscape — between life and death, preserving the past. Sibilance makes its atmosphere audible.

Hands of women dragging needles; half-choked heads

Folkloric and biblical images of violence and labour. Women's unending work; drowned or suffocated figures. The Pharaoh/drowned-firstborn allusion sits here.

Whiskey in two glasses

Companionable reunion after death, grounded in the biographical detail of her father drinking whiskey for his arthritis. The two glasses suggest a father expecting his daughter, which makes this a gentle image rather than a grandiose heavenly vision.

"Her heart's blood" on white linen

A fairy-tale motif (Grimms' "The Goose Girl" and others) — a mother's three drops of blood given as a protective token for a journey. Preserved inside the father's library, the image layers mother, daughter, folklore and memory in a single square of cloth.

The foxed leaf in a forest of fine shuffling

The library as a living forest — pages as leaves, shelves as trees. Echoes "Fireman's Lift" and the wider architectural-organic metaphor in Ní Chuilleanáin's work.

The crushed flowers that crack the spine

The final image. Memory kept inside books breaks the books open. The father is both contained by and spilling out of the library in which he is found.

"Bindings"

A crucial pun. Book-bindings and family-bindings both split open under the weight of grief.

Stylistic techniques

Third-person "she"

The poet refers to her younger self as "she" rather than "I." This creates distance and folk-tale formality — the daughter's memory is told as a story about someone else, which both protects the grief and casts it as part of a larger tradition of stories about lost parents.

Present-tense narration

The poem unfolds in a continuous present — fair, bog and library all happening at once in the speaker's memory. Time collapses; the child at the fair and the adult in the library occupy the same moment.

Three-stanza arc

Real → supernatural → reconciled. Each stanza has its own register, setting, and tone, but all three are connected by the word "follow" and by the thread of the father's presence.

Sibilance

Especially in stanza 2 — shivering, starlight, hiss-sounds — creating the stanza's unsettling atmosphere. (The note's earlier claim of onomatopoeia was wrong; sibilance is the correct term.)

Comic-epic simile

In stanza 1 — block of belly, back like a mountain, elbow like a plumber's bend. The similes are mock-heroic, capturing how a small child makes monumental figures out of ordinary adults.

Folkloric and biblical allusion

The three drops of blood on white linen (Grimm); the half-choked heads (Exodus / Pharaoh). Ní Chuilleanáin characteristically pulls in layered allusions without spelling them out.

In medias res opening

The word "So" at the start makes the poem feel mid-story, as if we have joined a life already in progress. By the end, that's exactly what we have done.

Tone and atmosphere

The poem moves through three distinct tonal registers:

• Stanza 1 is vivid, slightly comic, overwhelming from a child's-eye view — not hostile, just very large and very crowded.
• Stanza 2 is unsettling, nightmarish, historically haunted — the bog as a space where the violent Irish past and the personal grief of bereavement meet.
• Stanza 3 is quiet, tender, reconciled — the library as a place where the father is whole and waiting.

The poem ends neither triumphantly nor despairingly. It ends in a library whose books are splitting at the seams under the weight of what they hold. Memory is heavy; love is heavier; neither can be contained, and neither needs to be.

Remember!