“A Word is Dead”

The title of this poem is about the life of a word, it is a personification because a word is compared to a human being. The intelligent reader may expect that the poem is about the function of a word in communication and may wonder why a word is dead.

Considering the layout the intelligent reader can see that the text is a poem. The poem is organized in six lines, arranged into two tercets. It follows that the intelligent reader might be interested in finding out the function of the single tercet.

In the first tercet the third person says that when somebody speaks and uses words, as soon as a word is said dies.

In the second tercet the narrative voice changes into a first person narrator and expresses a totally different opinion from the first tercet. Indeed the function of the first tercet is to convey a point of view which is exactly the opposite of the the second tercet. The first person narrator says that a word begins to live when somebody says it.

The poet play with sounds: the first line ends like the second line, and the last lines of each tercet end with the same rhyme. In the poem there are some personifications, because a word is able to die and to live, which are human’s features.

The context of the poem is about the life cycle of a word. The pronoun “They” used by the poet could represent a group of intellectuals which believe that in the moment the word is said, it ends to live. On the other hand the first person narrator believes that this is the moment when the word starts to live, maybe because stops to be unused and remains in the memory of the people who use it.