Ireland was a British colony for more than seven centuries, for this time it was hidden their native identity, as well as their language. The British colonizers imposed not only their language but also their culture. In 1922, it was signed the Treaty in which Ireland was considered a free state. As and introduction to Heaney poems, I will use a poem of Yeats, who is the poet that starts to talk about postcolonial themes. Maybe Yeats was one the most important figures in the reconstruction of the Irish identity. He represents the relationship between Ireland and Britain in his poem "Leda and the Swan". The first publication of this poem was in the radical magazine "To-morrow" in 1923. Some years later it was republished in the …show more content…

As we can see in the poem "she sleeps now, her cold breast/ dandled by undertow". From my point of view, the most important fact in this poem it is the title which recalls once again to the Irish identity, using the Irish language, and the sound of waves are reproduced by the use of the "sibilants and sonorants." The poem is divided in four parts; the beginning is used to end the poem, in other words, the poems starts in the same way that it finishes. Until this moment I have only talked about the Irish identity as a postcolonial theme in Yeats and in Heaney. Nevertheless, from this moment I will start to talk about the poetic work of Seamus Heaney as Irish poet. Because I think it is remarkable to emphasize his poems about the Bog's people. These poems are not about the Irish identity in a direct way, but they also talk about Irish themes because Heaney compares "the sacrificial practices of an Iron Age people and the psychology of Irishman and Ulstermen who do the killing". Being an Irish and Catholic, he is worried about the violence in North Ireland. What Heaney does with these poems is to "reduce the history to a myth". "Bogland" is the first poem which is dedicated to the Bogs. This poem belongs to his first collection "Door into the Dark" which was published in 1969 an it is the last poem of this collection. At this time