Search for my tongue Flashcards
(8 cards)
You
The speaker is addressing someone directly with the personal pronoun “you”
By redirecting the question back to the reader, the speaker appears defensive and wants the reader to understand how she feels:
The speaker tries to create empathy for people who are bilingual
“two tongues in your mouth”
The image of “two tongues in your mouth” is shocking and creates an unpleasant thought:
It could also suggest that those with more than one “tongue” find it difficult to create enough space to speak one language, let alone two
switching between enjambemnt and end stopped lines
The writer alternates between enjambment and end-stopped lines which could reflect the tension between the mother tongue and the foreign tongue
“spit it out”
After the tongue has rotted, she is forced to “spit it out”:
The repetition of the speaker emphasises the extreme nature of the act
The speaker has had to discard her mother tongue
“a stump of a shoot” growing and how the “bud opens”
The poem uses the extended metaphor of a plant by describing “a stump of a shoot” growing and how the “bud opens”
The repetition of the word “grow”
uggests the tongue growing and becoming healthier
This stanza is in contrast to the earlier stanza, which describes the tongue as rotting and dead:
Instead, while she dreams, her tongue grows and comes back to life
“blossoms”
The speaker realises how powerful her mother tongue is, for whenever she believes it has died, it “blossoms”:
The word “blossoms” creates an image of something beautiful and appealing
The poem ends with the realisation that the speaker’s mother tongue is a powerful part of her
The poem is written in free verse
The free-flowing verse allows the speaker to let language flow naturally and organically through the poem:
It also allows the speaker to articulate how her mother tongue forms a part of her identity, which would not have been possible with a fixed form
