Hi all new to the forum and straight away looking for help thanks.

I have to write an essay on Jackie Kays poem `old tounge`
The esaay requires to discuss the formal features such as rhythm and metre, stanza form and rhyme.
Any help putting me on the right track would be most wellcome.

Thanks again


When I was eight, I was forced south.
Not long after, when I opened
my mouth, a strange thing happened.
I lost my Scottish accent.
Words fell off my tongue:
Eedyit, dreich, wabbit, crabbit
Strummer, teuchter, heidbanger,
So you are, so am ur, see you, see ma ma,
Shut yer geggie or I’ll gie you the malkie!

My own vowels start to stretch like my bones
And I turn my back on Scotland.
Words disappeared like the dead of the night,
New words marched in: ghastly, awful,
Quite dreadful, scones said like stones.
Pokey hats into ice-cream cones.
Oh where did all my words go –
my old words, my lost words?
Did you ever feel sad when you lost a word,
did you ever try to call it back
Like calling in the sea?
If I could have found my words wandering,
I swear I would have taken them in,
Swallowed them whole, knocked them back.

Out in the English soil, my old words
buried themselves. It made my mother’s blood boil
I cried one day with the wrong sound in my mouth;
I wanted them back; I wanted my old accent back,
my old tongue. My dour soor Scottish tongue.
Sing-songy. I wanted to gie it laldie.

Here is another page with slightly different formatting. Could be important, I am guessing:

[www.poetryarchive.org]

Here the italics add something and the author uses the current technique of only capitalizing letters at the beginning of a line when they start a new sentence.

Lots of unfamiliar references, likely understood by Scots. Shut yer geggie or I’ll gie you the malkie! sounds like, shut your face, or you get the back of me hand! and gie it laldie apparently means to give it hell (take one's best shot).

I don't see any particular familiar fixed form, nor a recurring meter or rhyme scheme. The author appears to be playing with the poem at the same time she is playing with words as she is composing the piece.

One gets a stumble right at the beginning with,

When I was eight, I was forced south.
Not long after, when I opened
my mouth ...

Makes one think that mouth was to rhyme with south and the lines were copied incorrectly. Same thing with,

Out in the English soil, my old words
buried themselves. It made my mother’s blood boil

Here, boil stands out as a rhyme for soil in the previous line, but again the author seems merely to be playing with her creation. Are these internal rhymes? Well, mebbe. But no such constantly recurring patterns throughout. So, safe to say her poem wanders off much the same way her youth and native tongue did? Your call.

The individual lines run the gamut of pentameter down to trimeter, mostly iambic and anapestic choices in meter. You can also look for wordplay such as assonance, consonance and alliteration, along with metaphors and similes (try to find them). Personification in there? What say you? Any other such tropes?

Great advice thanks very much, I am struggling with metre and rhythm.
I understand both are different throughout the poem, but take the opening line for example is this "Trochaic" ?, the symbolism, imagery, and stuff I can grasp, but the rhythm and metre, o wow.

Thanks

Here is how I parse it:

when I was EIGHT, i WAS forced SOUTH. (tetrameter - iambic)
NOT long AFTer, WHEN I OPened (trochees, acatalectic)
my MOUTH, a STRANGE thing HAPPened. (trimeter now - iambs, trailing syllable)
I LOST my SCOTTish ACCent. (iambs + trailing)
WORDS fell OFF my TONGUE: (trochees, catalectic)

The term catalectic means the meter is short the final syllable (tongue would have to be tonguey to complete the trochee), and acatalectic means it is complete. Trailing syllables is kinda the opposite, but I am not aware of any specific term for such phenomena. How that could have escaped a label, I am totally befuddled. You could also think of the endings as being either masculine (single syllable) or feminine, two or more syllables.

That is, south and tongue are masculine, whereas opened, happened and accent are feminine. To be more unfair, Iamb, TROchee and DACtyl are all trochees, but ANapest is a dactyl! Hopefully that will clear up all confusion? Yeah, right, Hugh.

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