WHAT TO CONSIDER WHEN YOU ANALYSE A POEM
The steps:

1. Consider the title to find out possible expectations, conjectures and curiosities;
2. Look at the layout: it gives us some clues and hints about the kind of the text;
3. Denotative analysis: read the poem and check up to all the words;
4. Connotative analysis: it takes into consideration different levels that all together contribute to make the message.
Levels:
• phonological: it analyses all the aspect connected to sound (repetition, refrain, consonance, assonance…)
• semantics: it analyses word choice (how the poet decide to use the word)
• syntax: word order, anaphor (backword), cataphor (foreword), deviation from the norm…
• figures of speech
5. Structural analysis: understand the function that each part of the text plays in the overall meaning of the text.

A word is dead

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.

I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

Una parola è morta

Una parola è morta
Quando viene detta,
Alcuni dicono.

Dico che solo
quel giorno
comincia a vivere.

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS – A word is dead

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 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 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 understand that she puts the subject and the verb at the end of the stanza. Thus, drawing the reader’s attention of the opinion of an unidentified group of people. Therefore such choice in word order highlights the speaking voice’s different opinion. Such opinion becomes the most relevant message of the text. It goes without saying that the key position of the subject pronoun “I” in the second tercet gaills/acquires a particular strenght since it epitomises the meaning the speaking voice attributes to words.
The intelligent reader perceives the opposition not only as the simple expression of two different opinions, on the contrast death/life of the poem. The idea of death is encapsulated in the very first tercet where both the use of the passive voice (“When it is said”) together with the rhyming couplet of the first two lines highlight the concept.
The alliterative quality of the third line helps the reader to stick the first opinion in his or her mind. The intelligent reader understands that the first opinion communicates no identity since indeed the opinion is of “Some say”.
The speaking voice of the second tercet becomes therefore the strongest voice in the eventual opinion choice on the reader’s part. The use of the active form helps and adds to the point the semantic field of Time is a further device to contribute to poetess’ message. Speaking allows communication and that is the reason why the speaking voice attributes so much importance to a word that becomes a living entity thanks to the use of personification which justifies the idea a word can either live or die.
It should turn out a bit ridiculous that a poetess could accept the idea that words have no life.