“A WORD IS DEAD” analysis

Just considering the title, the intelligent reader finds some curiosity that pushes him or her to make sense

of the speaker’s point of view.

Indeed, why do you say that a word might die? What’s the point of using a personification to refer to a

word?

The two questions are a sufficient reason to go on reading the text, but simply giving a glance to the layout you can easily realize the poem is arranged into two different parts still following the same pattern of two tercets that play a different function.

The reading experience allows the reader to find out the structure of the poem, which helps to convey two

different opinions about the nature and life of words.

The speaking voice seems to be taking distances from the opinion expressed by the “Some say” of the first stanza and to underline that she puts the subject and the verb at the end of the stanza, thus throwing the reader’s attention on the opinions of the unidentified group of people. Therefore such choice in words’ order highlights the speaking voice’s different opinion.

Furthermore in the first tercet the passive form seems to dominate while in the second one active form dominates, so the two different opinions are expressed even in the use of verb tenses.

In the poem there are also many references to time, so another additional question for the intelligent  is “Is the life or the death of a word connected to time?” Of course, because when a word is dead there is no time for a life and also communication exists in time.

The purpose of the poem is to show two different opinions about the use of words, to explain the role of the poetry, the communication and the lenght of time.