A WORD IS DEAD
Considering the title, the reader may be curious to find out the reason why a word “is dead”.
The layout shows that the poem belongs to a collection, since the first line corresponds to the title of the text,
thus underlines the concept once again: it sticks into our mind.
One more aspect to note is that even if the poem simply consist of six lines, it is organised into tercets, and
therefore, the reader might be intrested in finding out the function of each.
What the poetess says is that some people think that once a word is pronounced, it dies. The second
tercet expresses the speaking voice’s point of view, which is exactly the opposite of the common people’s one.
The first striking element of the text is a sound effect which is chosen on purpose. The first two lines of
the initial tercet exploit a rhyming couplet {dead ; said}, which creates a brake in the reading pace, reinforced
by the comma. The devices contribute to put the third line into evidence; in a few words, the reader is now
forced to focus her/his attention on the third line, the function of which is to express the point of view of the
common people. In addition there is a difference even in the line lenght that adds to what was said before and
once again seem to isolate the third line to the previous ones. This seems to pave to what the speaking voice is
going to do in the second part of the poem.
Indeed, the poetess seems also to create a different atmosphere in the second tercet, as if she wanted
to assert her point of view more vigorously. The intelligent reader can notice that the key position of the
subject pronoun “I” contributes to give strenght and vigor to the speaking voice’s point of view. Furthermore
there is a cesura in the middle of the firste line of the second tercet that highlights the poetess’ idea, since the
following run-on-line set the opinion that words have a life on their own at the centre of the text.
Besides the sound devices discussed so far, the reader can hear the density of the sound “D” and “S” in
the poem. The repetition of D is meant to put the lexical item “word” at the center of the investigation. Unless
your are myopic, you will realize that the word “WORD” is capitalized, and therefore, you will surely
understand that “WORD” togheter with “I say” become the two more relevant words of the text.
Considering now the semantic fields of the poem, the reader easily understands that they have always
something to do with the process of communication. The field os made up by “WORD”, “said”, “say”, “live”,
and this explains the message of the poem: if words do not have a life, if they do not live, there can not be any
communication, not even the one of the poem itself. The potess even asks for silence in the text – since silence
is a prerequisite to mutual understanding, in that the sound “S” is repeated eight times in the economy of the
poem, as if the poetess were asking for silence, to deliver her message.
To put the message in a better focus, the text also relies on the semantic field of time (“when”, “just”,
“begins”, “live”, “that” and “day”( and this aspect makes the intelligent reader understand that words,
especially written ones, like the ones of poetry, have a life on their own, as poets and poetesses particulary
know. Their word last in time and always create new meanings whenever a reader reads them. In short, the
poem is about the vitality of words and communication.