Read “Speaking a Foreign Language” by Alastair Reid and discuss the poem’s theme.

This lovely poem addresses an interesting question that is
on one level a complex linguistic problem and on another level a very personal problem.
The theme that emerges from the examination of both of these levels is that while
limited language is a barrier to self expression, the love of the heart climbs the
barrier and gives a metaphoric--and idiomatic--hand up, an idea that focuses attention
on the first stanza.

In the first stanza, the poetic
speaker (which may or may not be the voice of the poet) addresses the difficulty a
nonnative speaker has in navigating the waters of cultural idioms in a learned language.
Idioms are a particular sort of linguistic problem in learned languages because idioms
are based on figurative concepts in the culture that are widely shared and understood
but are not shared by other cultures. For example, if I say, "It was high and over the
fence," an American gets the sense that I'm making a baseball allusion that means that
something was done with great skill and even greater success (high and over the fence
refers to a powerful home-run hit that goes out of the field over the back fence) but
people in other cultures that don't follow baseball (are there any left?) won't know the
reference and therefore won't know what I'm trying to
say.

Conversely, if a speaker of English as a learned
language tries to use the above idiomatic expression, the expression or the intent may
get jumbled and the culture-dependent, culturally understood meaning get lost so that
the listener has to try to sort out a new meaning. For example, if I change the above
expression to, "I went high and over the fence," we're not sure what it might mean: I
did something successfully or I jumped and climbed over a fence? This is what the poetic
voice calls "clumsy on the tongue, these acquired idioms, / after the innuendos of our
own": idioms are clumsy because the cultural background giving them meaning is missing;
they have "innuendos" because of imperfect understanding generating original,
non-culturally determined, usage, as in the example
above.

The second point made is that the inadequacy of
language mastery prohibits or at least limits expressing one's true or full thoughts.
Linguists debate whether or not it is a truth that all languages are equally expressive
of all types of thoughts. Reid is indicating in this poem that from an experiential
perspective the truth is that not all thoughts can be expressed at all levels of
language mastery, which means vocabulary acquisition, grammar comprehension, syntax
mastery. This gap between thought and expression, this gap of things "lost in
translation," is described as "always wallowing / between what we long to say and what
we can."

The second stanza comes to the rescue by insisting
that love allows the listener to reach out in the simile of a "helping hand," or "limp
in sympathy" to guide the nonnative speaker to a safe harbor, as it were, of
understanding, a safe harbor away from the "tangle of language" for the heart "groping
toward" them so that anything "being lost in translation" is reclaimed by the
"translation of syntax into love." So the theme, delivered from the very empathetic
listener's perspective, is that love transcends the frailties and inadequacies of as yet
imperfectly learned language.