Imagery and sound

Imagery

Read the poem carefully and see where Sujata Bhatt plays with these meanings. For example, she imagines that knowing two languages is like having 'two tongues in your mouth' (line 4).

The poet compares her tongue to a plant, as she develops her ideas. This is called an extended metaphorextended metaphor: A metaphor is a descripton of one thing in terms of another - implicitly comparing the two, but without using 'as' or 'like' - eg 'he was drowning in a sea of troubles'. An extended metaphor keeps going, and likens several different aspects of the two things - eg 'he was drowning in a sea of troubles, buffeted by a storm of misfortune, overwhelmed by waves of despair'.. The lists below describe some of the ways in which her mother tongue is compared to a plant. Try to complete the second list, using the phrases in the first one as a guide:

Mother Tongue

• 'would rot / rot and die' (line 13)
• 'it grows back' (line 31)
• 'grows strong veins' (line 32)

Why it is like a plant

• plants die in the wrong environment

Why do you think this imageimage: A visual representation of something; a mental picture; a persona that is presented to the world. is so successful? Look at the contrasts it includes:

• Some of the imagery [imagery: Vivid 'word pictures' used by a writer to conjure up a mental image of something. ] is quite startling, when she imagines that the 'mother tongue' might 'rot and die in your mouth' (line 13), as the second ('foreign') language takes over.
• The lost tongue grows back at night when she dreams in Gujarati - like a plant that seems to have died, but then starts to bud and grow strong and beautiful ('blossoms') again.

Why do you think that the poem begins in a colloquialcolloquial: Informal spoken language; slang way (using everyday language), but uses such striking imagery towards the end?

Sound

Try reading it aloud. The Gujarati script is transliteratedtransliterated: To transliterate means to represent words in one alphabet using corresponding letters from another alphabet. into a phoneticphonetic: Using letters to represent the sounds of speech. English version in brackets, so even if you don't know any Gujarati, you can still have a go.

If the poem says more or less the same thing twice, might it just as well be written in one language only? What do you think would be lost if the Gujarati disappeared?