A WORD is dead

When it is said,

Some say.

I say it just

Begins to live

That day.

(Emily Dickinson, 1924)

In the poem there isn’t a title, because its function is performed by the first line of the text. So, analyzing the first line the intelligent reader should ask himself two questions:

1. Why does the poetess use the adjective “dead” to refer to a word which has no life?

2. Why does the writer write “A WORD” in capital letters?

The answer to these questions is that she wants to focus the reader’s attention on this point of the poem, because for her the word is very important.

Analyzing the layout the reader can realizes that the text is organized in two stanzas and each one consist of three lines, so they are called tercets. The text also makes use of very short words.

The stanzas are separated with a space because, in this way, the poetess wants to underline the difference on what she and other people think, also accentuated by the proximity of the word “say”.

On the phonological level there are pauses marked by commas and full stops and moreover on the first two lines there is a rhyme (dead-said).

Finally on the rhetorical level the reader can recognize the rhetorical figure of personification in the first line, when the writer attributes the adjective “dead” to the word “word”, characteristic of human beings.