Most of us spend the day treating words like tools, and Anne Scott Musil's "Words" starts there before quietly changing its mind. Its central idea is that language has two lives. In one, a word is a means: you say it to get something done. In the other, a word is an end, worth having for its own sake, the way a dance or a good set of dishes is. The poem's real interest is in how easily the first life slides into the second.
The opening stanzas are deliberately blunt. "The name refers for use" sounds like a dictionary definition, and the list that follows, "dog chair wall you", is made of flat, one-syllable nouns. Slipping "you" into the list is clever. It turns the reader into one more thing that is named and expected to respond: "demand response". The second stanza gives an example, "here's a chair so sit", where a word is simply an instruction and the body obeys. Even so, the poem admits some give in the system: "each hears his way / but knows the category general". Everyone pictures a slightly different chair, yet the category holds well enough that nobody sits on the floor. Communication works, the poem suggests, because we agree loosely rather than exactly.
The third stanza pushes the toolbox idea hardest. "To know grasp words / as means" has no comma between "know" and "grasp", so the two verbs press together. Knowing a word and gripping it become nearly the same act, as if a word were a handle. The hinge comes with "but in the poem", where the poem points to its own territory. Words there are "also ends like dance / the chosen china". The word "also" matters, because the poem does not throw out usefulness. "Chosen china" is harder to pin down, but judging by the image, it seems to be the good dishes picked out and kept for special occasions rather than everyday use. The repeated *ch* sound, with its slight clink, suggests how carefully such things are handled. A word chosen for its sound or shape, the line implies, deserves the same care.
What stops the poem from being only a statement about poetry is the fifth stanza. It moves out of "the poem" and into ordinary evening life: "in the dusk we put / our chores away and share / some talk a book". The missing punctuation makes "talk" and "a book" sit side by side as equals, as if speaking and reading were the same kind of pleasure. The chores are set aside, so the words are no longer working for anyone. Here the poem's claim becomes less about literature than about how people spend time together.
The imagery then softens, and so does the sound. "The hush / the wondrous listening / of hedges dozing birds" is full of quiet *h*, *sh* and *d* sounds, a striking change from "dog chair wall". The line break after "the hush" creates a small silence of its own. Hedges and birds are given the ability to listen, so the whole dusk seems to lean in toward the conversation. Because "hedges dozing birds" has no punctuation, it can be read as a list or as hedges in which birds doze. Either reading adds to the drowsy calm.
The ending states the idea and enacts it: "it's talk for talk". Earlier the poem said words were "means"; now talk has no purpose beyond itself. The final image, "words drifting like / drifting leaves alive", repeats "drifting" on the next line, so the line itself seems to hover. The simile hangs unfinished at the break, then lands on "alive", which gives the poem its last, slightly surprising note. Leaves that drift are usually falling, but these are alive.
The poem is written in free verse, in six tercets with no rhyme, no capital letters and no full stops. That lack of punctuation is part of the argument. Language here is not fenced in by rules, and the reader must decide where one phrase ends and the next begins. What makes the poem worth reading is that it shows this shift happening. It begins with orders and ends with drifting, and it quietly asks whether the second kind of language is the one we value most.