Free Verse, Interrupted
We like to think of this poem as a tasty surprise sandwich. It starts and ends with some pretty typical bread, but in the middle is something that you would never expect from a poem's form. It's like a surprise ingredient in your ham and cheese—think beetroot or wasabi aioli.
This pretty standard bread that starts and ends this poem is known as free verse. It's a freewheeling form of poetry that doesn't conform to any set patterns of rhythm or rhyme. Instead, it creates a conversational tone, which makes it sound like the speaker is engaging us on a personal level:
I ask you, what would you do
if you had two tongues in your mouth,
and lost the first one, the mother tongue,
and could not really know the other. (3-6)
Note any repeating patterns in those lines? Nope, neither do we—and that's okay. Here the speaker is addressing a "you" in the poem—and by extension she's addressing "us" the readers. So the free verse form is totally appropriate in creating a sense of an intimate conversation.
Most modern poetry tends to go in for this free verse approach, so form-wise "Search for My Tongue" is pretty standard—with one really notable exception: that second stanza. Even a quick glance at the poem will tell you that something is up with lines 17-30.
That something is absolutely crucial to the poem's focus. Here we have a speaker detailing her struggles negotiating life in a second language. Not only is the foreign language unfamiliar to her, she fears that it's replacing her first, native language. "Gee, bummer," you might be tempted to say. But if you've never had that experience, you really can't know where our speaker is coming from.
That's where the second stanza comes in. It's meant to disorient you in order to give you some small sense of what it's like for our speaker. Can't make heads or tails of those Gujrati symbols? Now you know some of our speaker's confusion. And she's even good enough to include English pronunciations below the Gujrati. Go ahead and read those out loud to see what you can make of them. Chances are—unless you speak Gujrati or a related language—that you're hearing and speaking a bunch of noise that doesn't connect to any meaning in your brain. Welcome to our speaker's world, Shmoopers.
This poem's form, then, is set up to draw you in. The free verse of stanzas 1 and 3 are meant to engage you directly in a conversation, while the second Gujrati stanza is meant to drop you off in the middle of the speaker's world—without a map or a cell phone. Lucky for you, this is only one poem. What if every day of your life was like this?