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    A Study Guide for John Montague's "A Grafted Tongue"
    A Study Guide for John Montague's "A Grafted Tongue"
    A Study Guide for John Montague's "A Grafted Tongue"
    Ebook29 pages20 minutes

    A Study Guide for John Montague's "A Grafted Tongue"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for John Montague's "A Grafted Tongue," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 19, 2016
    ISBN9781535816755
    A Study Guide for John Montague's "A Grafted Tongue"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for John Montague's "A Grafted Tongue" - Gale

      1

      A Grafted Tongue

      John Montague

      1972

      Introduction

      When A Grafted Tongue was first published in Montague’s The Rough Field (1972), it did not bear the same title, which was supplied only when the poem was reprinted in Montague’s Selected Poems in 1982. The Rough Field was intended as one long epic poem, and what is now known as A Grafted Tongue appeared as part five of a section entitled A Severed Head, which was itself part four of The Rough Field. It was the old Gaelic rhyme that forms the epigraph to A Severed Head that provided the phrase that later became the title of the poem: And who ever heard / such a sight unsung / As a severed head / With a grafted tongue?

      A Grafted Tongue is a terse, powerful poem that conveys a great deal in just ten short stanzas. It shows the disruption and suffering caused when one culture imposes its ways upon another. In this case, the English, who conquered Ireland in the seventeenth century, are in the process of enforcing the teaching of English in Irish schools. The result is that Gaelic, the native Irish language, is rapidly dying out, and with the loss of the language comes the loss of an entire culture. The poem implies that personal identity is bound up with the language of one’s birth, the suppression of which produces a crisis in personal

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