A title like "Lexicology" promises order: the study of words, their sorting and their histories. What follows is the opposite of a dictionary entry. In seven short lines, the poem gives us a speaker whose mind is crowded with feeling but who can only produce a sigh, a pronoun, and finally a stifled anger. Its central idea is that language breaks down at the moments we most need it, shrinking to the smallest sounds and then dying before it reaches anyone.
The opening stanza reads like a tiny origin story. "The first word was oh" could describe a baby, the beginning of human speech, or the start of one relationship. The poem leaves that open. What matters is that the first word isn't really a word in the dictionary sense. "Oh" is a cry, closer to breath than to meaning. Then comes "presently you," and the adverb is worth pausing on. It means "soon," but it also contains "present," so the other person arrives both in sequence and in the moment. Language moves from exclamation to address in a single step. Yet the sentence stops on "you," with no verb and no explanation. We are told where words begin, and then the account falters.
The second stanza is a question with no question mark. "Is now any better" has no clear subject: is the situation better, or the speaker, or the speaking itself? Because "you" ends the first stanza and "is" begins the second, reading straight across the gap produces "you is," a small grammatical fracture. It may be an accident of the line break, but it fits a poem about speech going wrong. The speaker's answer is a state, not a statement: "with my mind full / and vexed." The break after "full" leaves "and vexed" as a short stub, only two syllables long, so the fullness is cut off by irritation. There is a pointed irony here, since the mind is full but the poem has so far managed only "oh" and "you." The mind is crowded and the vocabulary is nearly empty.
The last stanza gives the poem its sharpest image: "angry words go out / in a dead mouth." "Go out" works two ways. Words leave, but they also go out the way a flame or a light does, so the anger is extinguished as it is spoken. The choice of "in" rather than "from" is odd and effective. The words don't escape the mouth but die inside it, or perhaps are released into a mouth that can no longer answer. The poem never says who or what is dead, and that restraint is wise. The "dead mouth" might be the speaker's own, silenced by grief, or the listener's. It might even recall a dead language, one of those that survive only in the study of words, which would tie the image back to the title.
The form carries the same sense of constriction. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, as if the speaker has no energy for the formalities of sentences. The stanzas run two lines, three lines, two lines, and most lines hover around four to six syllables, so the poem feels clipped and breathless. Nearly every word is a single syllable, with "presently" and "angry" as the only real exceptions, and each slows the line just enough to be noticed. The sounds matter too. "Oh," "you," "now," "out" and "mouth" share rounded, open vowels, the shape the lips make when they are about to speak and can't. The poem begins with the sound of an open mouth and ends by naming one.
What makes the poem worth reading is its compression. In a few lines it covers the whole arc from first utterance to failed speech without once explaining itself. It also turns the title into a quiet joke at the reader's expense. A lexicologist would want the words defined, but here the important things are the gaps: the missing verb after "you," the missing subject of "is now any better," the missing identity of the dead. We are left to do the work ourselves, and in doing so we feel how much more language has to carry than its words alone.