"A WORD IS DEAD" by Emily Dickinson

What do you expect the poem will be about?

Considering the title I expect the poem to be about comunication.

I think the poem will be about a word will never be used again.

The reader is curious to discover/to find out why the word is "dead".

Considering the lay-out the reader realizes/can see the text is organised into/is arranged into two stanzas of three line each.

The poem consists of six lines organised into two tercets therefore he/she would like to understand/find out the reason why the poet/poetess has arranged the message into two stanzas and last but not least the function of each stanzas.

DENOTATIVE ANALYSIS

The poem expresses two different points of view about the life of a word: some people think whenever you say  a word it dies, the poetess believes that when someone says a word it starts to live.

The function of the first stanza is to report common people's ideas about the life of the word; the function of the second tercet is to report the poetess' opinion. It follows that/as a result/as a consequence the intelligent reader understands the lay-out has been conceived to present two opposite/two contrasting ideas about the nature of words.

CONNOTATIVE ANALYSIS

The poem has got the following scheme: AABCDB

Syntaxt is turned upside-down in the two tercets: the first tercet makes use of a run-on-line in the first two lines, in the second tercet what takes place is exactly the opposite.