TEXT ANALYSIS - A Word Is Dead by E. Dickinson

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 why a personification to refer to a word. The two questions are the 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 different function.

The reading experience the reader to find out the structure of the poem helps to convey to different opinions about the nature and life of words.

The speaking voice seems to be taking distances from the opinion expressed by the crowd in the first stanza and to underline that she puts the subjects and the verb at the end of the stanza, thas drawing the reader's attention of the opinion of an unidentified group of people. Therefore such choice highlights the different opinions.

The poetess to add contrast between the tercets decided to use passive and scrive forms. Indeed, in the first stanza the use of passive tenses dominate, as the active one does in the second stanza. Using these verb tenses the speaker wants to underline more the difference between his opinion and the other's opinion.

Analyzing the text syntax, we can see the poetess turned upside down the structure of the first half of the poem to create the second part. Therefore, in the first tercet the poetess wants to focus the reader's attention on who says instead of what is said, as she does in the second tercet.

Moreover, in the text the intelligent reader can find some figures of speech. There is a repetition in the use of say and said, it's simply to understand what important role the poetess wants to give to this action. Then, there is alliteration in the first paragraph between said and dead (in the first and in the second line); this figure of speech could represent the common and ordinary though of the crowd. Perhaps, there is a rhyme between say and day, that are in the end of the stanzas.

The timing nouns we can see in the poem, and the general message it gives, make us understand the text is about communication, and about the length of time the words are used; also, this text makes us thinking about how many words we can talk with and the importance of using much of this various vocabulary.