The Use of Imagery in Search for my Tongue and Blessing

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The Use of Imagery in Search for my Tongue and Blessing

In both of the poems, 'Search for my Tongue' and 'Blessing' the poets use imagery in interesting ways to describe two totally different things; in Search for my tongue the poet uses the image of a plant to describe how the person's first language comes back to her, and in Blessing the poet describes the water pipe bursting as a sort of miracle.

The poem Search for my tongue is about how a student from America believes she has lost her first language because she has been speaking English since she was small. The poem asks us in the first section what would we do if we had two languages and lived in a place where we would have to speak the foreign language? She then answers this question by saying that the 'mother tongue' or first language would,

"Rot and die in your mouth until you had to spit it out." This shows that the poet feels very strongly about loosing her original language. In the second section, which is written in Gujerati, it seems to be more poetic and flows better when reading it. The last section is describing how her first language the Gujerati has come back to her and describes it as how a flower would grow and blossom.
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The poem Blessing is about how in a very dry and hot country where it hardly ever rains, where they imagine the smallest amount of water crashing into a tin mug the water pipe which runs through the village bursts and all the people rush towards it with every pot and pan they can carry.

In Search for my Tongue the poet uses 'tongue' instead of 'language' so when the poet says,

"if you had two tongues in your mouth and lost the first one" you get the image of two tongues in one mouth and ...

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