Stanza 1 Summary

Lines 1-2

You ask me what I mean
by saying I have lost my tongue.

• Oh man—we're late to the poem. Don't you hate it when that happens? It looks like we missed someone asking the speaker a question.
• Apparently, the "you" of this poem was hoping for some clarification of the speaker's comment: "I have lost my tongue."
• To be fair, that is a strange thing to say. We mean, your tongue is pretty much connected to the back of your mouth, so it's not an easy thing to misplace.
• We've heard the question "Cat got your tongue?" though, and so we're guessing that this comment is probably in line with the same metaphorical way of speaking.
• Let's read on to find out if we're right.

Lines 3-7

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,
the foreign tongue.

• To answer the question put to her (and we're just guessing that our speaker is a her, since we have no more info to go by on this point), the speaker comes up with a question of her own. She's turning the tables on the "you" of the poem.
• Her question, essentially, is a "What would you do?" scenario. She asks what "you" would do if a few things were to happen.
• Happening 1: You now have two tongues in your mouth instead of the usual one. There's no word on how you'd be expected to chew food if this happened, but we're going to bet that this isn't the speaker's focus.
• Happening 2: You lost the first tongue somehow. Again, our speaker is sketchy with the details on how. Was it that darn metaphorical cat? We can't tell.
• We do know, however, that this tongue was the mother tongue.
• Now, this may seem a bit of an odd expression, since tongues aren't really very motherly things. They don't look after you like a mother would, but—very much like a mother—they do connect you to a sense of your self, your past, and your culture.
• In this case, the use of the word tongue here is an example of metonymy. Basically, metonymy is a fancy metaphor where an object is used to describe something associated with it. For example, we might speak of "the crown" when we really mean the king.
• In this case, "tongue" is associated with language and speech. Your "mother tongue," then, is your native language, the first language you learned to speak. Got it? Good.
• Well, maybe not so good—in our speaker's question, though, this first language has been lost somehow.
• Happening 3: The second tongue (language) that's accompanying your mother tongue is, by definition, a "foreign tongue." In other words, it's a foreign language that you may know, but you can't "really know" it (6).
• By that, our speaker suggests that there's really no place like home when it comes to language. Sure, you try speaking in a second language, but you won't have the same familiarity you would with your first.
• So, to sum up our speaker's question here, the scenario she puts to her audience is the experience of having to speak in a foreign language and losing your connection to your native way of speaking.
• If that happens, she asks, what would you do? Well?

Lines 8-9

You could not use them both together
even if you thought that way.

• Well, we know one thing that you won't be doing: using both your native and foreign languages together.
• Even if you thought that way, you couldn't speak that way.
• This makes a certain sense. If you've ever been in a place where you had to speak another language for a prolonged period of time, you're probably familiar with the way that speaking another language makes you think in a slightly different way. It's subtle, but the experience essentially blends two ways of thinking—in your native language and in the foreign one—together.
• You can't speak that way, of course. Who would understand you if you just started mixing your native language with the foreign one?
• It looks like you're stuck using one or the other, no matter how you think.

Lines 10-14

And if you lived in a place you had to
speak a foreign tongue,
your mother tongue would rot,
rot and die in your mouth
until you had to spit it out.

• If you're keeping up here, remember that our speaker has asked her audience a question, way back in line 3: What would you do if…?
• Up to now, that "if" involves losing contact with your native language, not truly knowing a foreign language, and not being able to speak in a mixture of the two.
• In these lines, our speaker adds more detail to this bummer of a linguistic set-up:
• In addition to all this, imagine if you had to speak in a foreign language only. What would happen?
• Oh, no big deal, argues our speaker. Your mother tongue is just going to rot out of your head. That's all.
• She extends her central metaphor to describe the way that, without any regular exercise or practice, your first language would just wither with disuse.
• You know that one piece of exercise equipment that you bought after watching that late night infomercial, only now it just sits in your basement getting moldy? Sure—we all have one of those…right?
• Well, now imagine that, instead of an Abdominator, this was actually your tongue. Only it wasn't actually your tongue. It was just metaphorically your tongue, representing your native language that has totally gone away since you don't use it anymore.
• Even sadder, you have to "spit it out," get rid of it completely (14).
• Sound like a good time? Not exactly—we'd rather be Abdominating.

Lines 15-16

I thought I spit it out
but overnight while I dream, 

• Interestingly, our speaker makes the turn here from addressing "you" to talking about herself in the first-person ("I").
• There's still no indication on whether our speaker is a "he" or "she" at this point, so we'll keep using "she." You can "check" out our "Speaker" section for more on her.
• It turns out that our speaker only thought she had suffered the terrible fate that she's been describing to the "you" of the poem.
• She thought she had "spit [my mother tongue] out," losing her native language and being forced to speak in a foreign tongue (15).
• Good news, though. Somehow, it seems that our speaker has dodged this bullet, because something happens when she dreams…
• But we don't find out what that is in this stanza.
• The suspense is killing us. What happens when she dreams? We'll have to read on to find out.
• Before we do, though, we'll just point out all the rhyming and metrical patterns we notice here. We've got...well, there's...oh, who are we kidding? There's not a rhyme to be found here. Instead, this poem's got some serious free verse going on. Check out "Form and Meter" for more on that.