Just considering the title, the intelligent reader finds some curiosity that pushes them 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 realise 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 and 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 drawing the reader's attention on the opinion of the unidentified group of people. Therefore such choice in word order highlights the speaking voice's different opinion.

The keyword in the first tercet is "dead" and that line portrays a passive action, while in the second one the keyword is "live" and the line portrays an active action.

Which means the poem is about the role of poetry itself. The poetess wants to communicate what poetry is to her: that is something active, full of motion and life instead of boring, lifeless words that follow one another.