Just considering the title the reader may espect the poem to deal with words and there life. They are probably living entities because the speaking voice uses the word "dead".

The layout shows the composition consists of six lines arranged into two similar patterns,that is two tercets that is stanzas of three lines each,separated by a full stop. It follows that the reader wants to know finding the reason of sych structure.

Taking structure into account,the reader has to read the text to find out content and later become awer of the function of the two tercets in the economy of the poem.

The speaking vouice reports coomon people's opinion about the life of a word once it is said. At the same time the speaker expresses a point-of-view on the matter discussed and asserts her strong opinion:words start living when said.

Word order plays a relevant roule in the communicatuve function of the poem. In dead the choice of two stress words following one another adols strenghts to meaning and in paticular brings strongly to surface the poetesse'idea about words and there exsistent. At the same time the phrase "i say" immediatly recose "some say" on the previous line. In addition one cannot but meantion the frequent occurance of sound "s" in the whole text. It is a way to create sound parallelism between words and create choesion between the two stanzas and of course between the two different points-of-view.