A WORD IS DEAD - TEXTUAL ANALYSIS 

Just considering the title the intelligent reader finds some curiosity that pushes him or her to make sense of the speaker’s point of view. Indeed, why do you say that a word might die? 

What is the point of using a personification to refer to a word?

The two questions are a sufficient reason to go on reading the text, but simply giving a glance to the lay out you can easily realize that the poem is arranged into two different parts still following the same pattern of two tercets that play a different function.

The reading experience allows the reader to find out that the structure of the poem helps to convey to different opinions about the nature and life of words.

The speaking voice seems to be taking distances from the opinion expressed by the “some say” of the first stanza and to underline that she puts the subject and the verb at the end of the stanza, thus drawing the reader’s attention on the opinion of the unidentified group of people . Therefore such choice in the word order highlights the speaking voice’s different opinion. It is as if the poetess has turned the two tercets upside down.

There are also other contrasts on the semantic level, such as the adjective “dead” in the first stanza which is set against the verb “to live” in the second one, and the passive form of the verb in the first one which is set against the active form in the second one.

Another important semantic choice is the reference to the concept of time, in the first tercet the adjective “dead” means that there’s no time, whereas in the second one the use of “begins” at the present simple and the time expression “that day” express that communication exists in time.

The poetess displays that the ability to use words becomes everliving and everlasting.