Lab activity: Poststructuralism, Deconstruction Poems Blog 1

This blog task is given by Dilip Barad Sir, this is a part of Lab Activity,  

What is Deconstruction?

Deconstruction, a literary theory developed by Jacques Derrida, teaches us to question the binary oppositions and hidden assumptions in a text. It doesn’t mean destroying meaning—it means digging deeper to see the instability within it. In this case, we deconstruct the sonnet to see how it both affirms and undermines its own romantic message.

Poem 1:

When we first read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, it feels like a simple love poem. The speaker praises their beloved, famously asking:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

At first glance, this sounds romantic, even eternal. But after watching the video “How to Deconstruct a Text: Sonnet 18—Shall I Compare Thee”, I realized that there’s much more happening beneath the surface.

The poem praises the beloved by comparing them favorably to summer. summer is too short, too hot and sometimes dimmed. 

The poem begins with nature but ends with the poem itself. instead of celebrating real love or beauty, poet praises his own self/poetry.

New Meaning Emerges

By applying deconstruction, we understand that Sonnet 18 doesn’t just praise a person—it also exposes how beauty, love, and even immortality are constructs shaped by language and art. The poem praises the beloved but also serves Shakespeare’s ego as a poet.

Poem 2: 

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Poetry, too, works by proposing parallels, inviting the reader to make surprising connections between apparently unrelated signifiers. Ezra Pound’s minimalist Imagist poem “In a Station of the Metro” merits the critical attention it has long drawn—not because it mirrors a specific visual scene, but because it offers a distilled analogy between the urban and the natural, the modern and the timeless. The image it constructs hinges on the fusion of two disparate but hauntingly fitting elements:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

The analogy is visually arresting, but also ontologically unstable. The poem prompts the question: are these faces and petals merely signifiers—symbols within language—or do they point to real things that we recognize from our lived experience? Do we see their referents, or are we responding to their absence, shaped only in the mind’s eye?

Yes, in a way, the poem gestures toward the real. But what it ultimately does is separate these images from their real-world referents. The urban crowd is reduced to its briefest essence: not noise, not motion, but a flicker of ghost-like presence, distilled into the word “apparition”. Likewise, the petals are not situated in a lush spring setting—they appear isolated, purified, and poetic. The comparison, while effective, removes both images from context, allowing their aesthetic and emotional resonances to rise above any objective description of people or plants.

In this process, Pound’s poem draws attention to how signifiers work independently of reference. The word “apparition” strips the urban scene of its concrete detail and infuses it with mystery and spectrality. The metaphor dislocates the ‘faces’ from the crowd, turning human features into fragile, pale forms, much like petals. These associations emerge through difference: between the solidity of the crowd and the delicacy of a petal, the heaviness of black boughs and the lightness of soft faces, the artificiality of the metro and the naturalness of a branch.

Crucially, what gives this poetic comparison its power is the way it is presented on the page. Two lines, isolated in blank space, resist narrative flow or syntactic complexity. Their visual and rhythmic arrangement signals poetry, not prose. The near-rhyme of “crowd” and “bough”, the soft consonance in “petals” and “wet”, and the contrasting rhythms—the quick, multiple syllables of the first line followed by the weighty, measured pause of the second—create a musicality that is felt as much as understood.

Julia Kristeva refers to this kind of signifying activity as “the semiotic”—the pre-verbal, rhythmic, sensory mode of meaning that comes before language as logic. She compares it to the rhythmic babbling of infants, where sound and pattern hold emotional energy rather than propositional content. In this sense, Pound’s poem enacts a moment of pure sensation—disrupting rational narrative and drawing the reader into a sensory, almost subconscious space where rhythm, image, and mood carry more force than literal meaning.

Thus, the poem becomes less about what is described and more about what is suggested. It uses minimal language to unlock maximum resonance, proving that poetry’s strength often lies in its ability to detach language from reference and let it shimmer in the realm of associations, sounds, and affect. The primacy of the signifier—its power to shape thought even without pointing to fixed meaning—is fully at work here, in just two lines.

Poem 3: 

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

William Carlos Williams’s highly patterned poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” appears, at first glance, to celebrate the material world. Unlike metaphor-heavy poetry, there are no comparisons here, no analogies or abstract suggestions—just simple, visual images. One might argue that this poem asserts the physical reality of what it describes: a red wheelbarrow, rainwater, white chickens. It even begins with a grand philosophical claim—“so much depends”—suggesting that these real, grounded objects carry weight and meaning in our world.

And yet, if we look again, the poem resists this reading. The wheelbarrow is "red", but what kind of red? The poem does not specify. There is no description of texture or weight. It is "glazed", but again, the word evokes shine and smoothness, not the muddiness or rough utility one might associate with an actual farmyard. The water does not splash or soak—it simply exists, like a layer of language. And the white chickens remain clean and idealized, as if they, too, are untouched by dirt or mess.

So, the poem begins to look less like a representation of the real, and more like a linguistic construction—an arrangement of signifiers carefully placed to evoke a kind of purity or innocence. The farmyard, if it exists at all, is unreal, emptied of noise, smell, or labor. In fact, we may more easily imagine a storybook scene or a child’s toy set than a working agricultural space. The objects described feel almost imagined, like a memory or a stylized painting.

Rhythm plays a vital role in this construction. The poem breaks each image into short, evenly balanced lines, creating a visual and metrical repetition that feels ritualistic or childlike. Each couplet maintains a steady visual pattern—three words followed by one. The repetition is soothing, minimal, clean. As with Ezra Pound’s metro poem, it’s the arrangement of words and silences, not just their meanings, that shape the reader’s experience.

On this reading, the poem does not present objects, but constructs them in language. What matters is not the actual wheelbarrow, but the idea of it—glossed and lifted from the world, abstracted, purified. “So much depends,” then, not on the object’s real presence, but on our capacity to imagine it in a world where simplicity and order are linguistic illusions.

Thus, Williams’s poem seems to promise material certainty, but ultimately offers semantic play. Its strength lies in showing how language creates the illusion of the real, and how poetry uses rhythm, spacing, and surface detail to construct feeling and meaning, not to reflect some stable truth. In that sense, like all modernist poetry, The Red Wheelbarrow shows us the primacy of the signifier—how what we see in language depends less on what exists in the world, and more on what the poem lets us see.

Poem 4: 

The three stages of the deconstructive process described here I have called the verbal, the textual, and the 

linguistic. They are illustrated using Dylan Thomas's poem 'A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a 

child in London' (Appendix 2).

1. The Verbal Stage: Contradiction and Paradox in the Language

At the surface, Thomas declares he will not mourn the child's death. Yet, the poem’s language is rich, emotional, and symbolic, filled with the very mourning it claims to reject. The title itself is a paradox: the act of refusal is already a form of attention—and thus, of mourning.

The poem ends with:

“After the first death, there is no other.”

This statement refutes itself. The phrase “first death” implies there could be a second, third, and so on. So saying there “is no other” contradicts the idea of a “first.” This exposes how language undoes itself, creating internal conflict at the verbal level.

Another example:

“Never until the mankind making... darkness...”

The use of “never” and “until” together is contradictory. “Never” implies an absolute denial, while “until” suggests a future point where something could happen. This instability undermines logical sense and shows how even serious reflections cannot fully control meaning.

Also, Thomas inverts binaries. Darkness, usually associated with death or fear, becomes creative and life-giving:

“...the mankind making / Bird beast and flower / Fathering and all humbling darkness.”

Darkness here is not death, but fathering and creating, which goes against our usual understanding. It reflects the post-structural idea that language doesn’t describe the world—it builds a strange new world of its own.

2. The Textual Stage: Shifts in Time, Tone, and Viewpoint

The poem has no clear, stable timeline. The first two stanzas take us to cosmic and mythic time, talking about elemental forces—water, fire, earth, darkness—imagining the end of the world. Then suddenly, the third stanza brings us back to the present, describing “the burning of the child’s death.”

This switch from eternal, abstract imagery to the intensely personal and physical moment of the child's death creates a break in tone and focus. There is no smooth progression, and this lack of stable structure mirrors the poem's emotional uncertainty.

The final stanza again zooms out to history, referencing London and the Thames, placing the child in a larger historical-symbolic context. But this also fails to fix meaning—does the child become symbolic of all of London’s suffering? Or is she absorbed into a mythic eternity?

Thomas refuses to explain why he will not mourn. The poem never tells us why mourning is inappropriate—this omission creates ambiguity. Does he believe traditional mourning is false? Or that the child has entered a holy or eternal state?

Thus, the poem shifts between personal grief, cosmic vision, and historical memory, making it hard to locate a single attitude or message.

3. The Linguistic Stage: Language Fails, Yet Tries

The greatest irony is that the poem claims to refuse mourning, but is itself a highly ritualistic and lyrical act of mourning. It uses elevated, sacred language:

“Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter.”

This is mourning by another name, dressed in religious and epic tones. The poet condemns traditional mourning language:

“I shall not murder / The mankind of her going with a grave truth.”

Yet he immediately uses rich, poetic imagery, metaphor, and solemn tone—precisely the kind of elevated speech he claims to reject. He tries to escape the trap of cliché, but falls into the same rhetorical patterns, unable to avoid the language of mourning.

Thomas refers to the child as “London’s daughter”—a metaphor that transforms her from an individual into a symbolic figure. This too is a language trap: the girl becomes something she never was, abstracted from real life into a mythical image.

Even the “unmourning Thames” is a contradiction. Water doesn’t mourn, of course, but giving it that role or non-role adds to the sense that language tries—and fails—to say the unsayable.

Conclusion:

 A Poem at War with Itself

Through these three stages—verbal, textual, and linguistic—we see that “A Refusal to Mourn…” is not a stable, coherent work, but a fractured and conflicted performance. It resists mourning, yet mourns. It claims to escape cliché, yet uses it. It builds a world out of language, but that world constantly collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

In this way, the poem perfectly suits a deconstructive reading: it pretends to mean clearly, but in fact shows us how meaning slips, folds, and fails.

References: 

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester UP, 2002.

Belsey, Catherine. Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction. OUP Oxford, 2002.

Video link: https://youtu.be/ohY-w4cMhRM?si=Q4PO6ZKyKx1sHe2k