TEXTUAL ANALYSIS – “A word is dead”

 “A word is dead” is a poem written by Emily Dickinson in 1924. Reading the title, the reader makes conjectures about the poem’s content. The title is a metaphor: the poetess confers to the term “word” the human’s life’s feature of death. So the poetess wants to examine the “life” of a word, that is examine the word’s meaning.

The layout of the poem consist in two stanzas of three lines, so it is a lyric poem for the length.  The two stanzas have two different meanings, that the reader must find if he wants to understand the poem. The reader can also understands some about the structure, which consists in short lines, of which the ending lines are shorter than other.

Reading the first stanza, it’s possible to understand that it’s topic is the third person narrator’s viewpoint about the words life. Te expression “some” suggests that a ordinary person is speaking, and his opinion is that one word dead when it is used. In the second stanza the narrator and the opinion change. The poet think that the word’s life starts exactly when it is said. So the poem’s layout has the function to create an antithesis between the two opinion.

So the poem is a dialogue between two different viewpoint about the words life. The reader asks oneself what is the correct opinion or if there are necessarily a predominant viewpoint. Apparently the poetess doesn’t give an answer. Looking at the sounds, the alliteration of the dental sound “d” in the first stanza contrast with the alliteration of the hissing sound “s” in the second, so the antithesis is underlined. Moreover, the rhyme scheme has the function to connect the ending lines, in which there are an inversion of the alliterative sounds “s” and “d”. The anaphora of the verb “to say”, finally, has the function to connect the two stanzas, highlighting the two different point of view. But if the reader consider the structure and the rhyme scheme in a different way, it’s possible to understand that probably the poetess is in right. Effectively, the short lines underline every word’s importance, because they force the reader to look every word, and also the rhyme scheme emphasizes the importance of short words (“dead”, “say”, “day”). So layout, structure and rhyme scheme has the function to fix in the reader’s mind the poem, and the reader starts reflecting on the words he has read to understand if the poetess is in right.

So the message of the poem is that the life of a word starts when it is said: the word’s meaning depends on the background, on the speakers, on the way to express it, on his connection with other words. Who knows the language knows that emotions caused by the words remain in time and consist in the life of the word.