Lab Activity: Poststructuralism, Poems, and Gen AI: Deconstructive Reading

 🔷Hello learners. I am a student. This blog task is given by Dilip Sir. This blog explore how deconstruction works in literature. We studied a video on Sonnet 18, read key pages from Catherine Belsey’s Poststructuralism and Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory, and referred to a ResearchGate article analyzing poems by Pound and Williams.

How to Deconstruct a Text : Deconstructive Reading of Three Poems by Shakespeare, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams

 Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

by William Shakespeare

Poem : 1

William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, often read as a celebration of eternal beauty and poetic immortality, can be deconstructed to reveal the underlying instability of its meaning. The poem appears to elevate the beloved above nature, suggesting that their beauty will live forever through the “eternal lines” of verse. However, from a poststructuralist perspective, this promise of permanence is questionable. Language, as deconstruction argues, is not stable meanings shift over time and are never fixed. Therefore, the idea that poetry can “give life” eternally is itself built on uncertain ground. The sonnet also relies heavily on binary oppositions such as summer versus the beloved, life versus death, and nature versus art. Yet these oppositions begin to break down within the poem. For instance, the poet claims that death will not claim the beloved, yet death is still present in the very act of naming and denying it. By mentioning death, the poem acknowledges its power, even as it tries to suppress it. Furthermore, the language that praises the beloved’s constancy uses metaphors drawn from the natural world “darling buds of May,” “eye of heaven” which are themselves transient, thus undermining the claim of eternal beauty. According to Catherine Belsey’s notion of the “primacy of the signifier,” the poem’s words (signifiers) do not secure a stable meaning (signified), but instead point to an endless play of interpretations. Ultimately, deconstruction reveals that the sonnet’s confident surface hides internal contradictions and uncertainties that challenge its very claim to immortality.

Poem : 2

🔷 Deconstructing Ezra Pound’s "In a Station of the Metro" :

🔷 "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough."

Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” appears to offer a brief, vivid image: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” On the surface, it captures a fleeting modern moment through a metaphor that connects human faces in a subway to delicate flower petals. However, from a deconstructive perspective, the poem resists stable meaning. The word “apparition” introduces ambiguity are the faces real, ghostly, or imagined? This choice destabilizes the certainty of perception, suggesting that what is seen may be more illusion than reality. Moreover, the structure lacks a verb, leaving the relationship between the two lines open to interpretation. Are the faces like petals? Or are they petals? The poem’s meaning shifts with the reader’s perspective. The juxtaposition of industrial modernity (the metro station) with natural beauty (petals and a bough) sets up a binary that deconstruction questions. Instead of resolving into a neat metaphor, the two images remain in tension, refusing to unify. As Catherine Belsey might argue, the signifiers in this poem “apparition,” “faces,” “petals,” “bough” do not lead to a single signified idea but instead evoke multiple, unstable meanings. The poem thus exemplifies how language, even in its most compressed form, can never fully control or contain meaning, always leaving space for doubt, difference, and reinterpretation.

Poem: 3

🔷 Deconstructing William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow":

🔷 "so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens."

William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” seems deceptively simple with its short, imagistic lines: “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens.” On the surface, it appears to celebrate ordinary objects and moments. However, deconstruction reveals the instability beneath this apparent clarity. The opening line, “so much depends,” immediately raises a question: what depends, and why? The poem never explains, leaving meaning suspended. The structure, with its broken syntax and isolated images, resists narrative or logical flow. The wheelbarrow, rainwater, and chickens become floating signifiers without a clear relationship or function, undermining the reader’s search for coherence. The use of color “red” and “white” might suggest symbolism, but the poem gives no context to anchor interpretation. As poststructuralist theory emphasizes, language does not reflect reality directly but constructs it through unstable signs. Thus, the poem’s minimalism becomes a site of multiplicity rather than clarity. It presents ordinary things not as solid, fixed symbols, but as endlessly interpretable fragments. Like Catherine Belsey’s argument about the primacy of the signifier, this poem shows how meaning does not lie within the object itself but in how language frames and defers it. In this way, the poem subtly deconstructs its own apparent simplicity, exposing the complex and shifting nature of language and meaning.

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).

Dylan Thomas’s poem “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” appears, on the surface, to be a solemn rejection of conventional mourning. However, when deconstructed, the poem reveals deep contradictions and instabilities. At the verbal level, the language contains internal paradoxes most notably in the final line: “After the first death, there is no other.” The phrase undermines itself, as the word “first” implies the existence of a second, third, and so on. Similarly, the use of “never until” is logically contradictory, combining absolute negation with deferment. These contradictions are not errors but signs of language’s inherent slipperiness, showing that words cannot be fully trusted to convey stable meaning. At the textual level, the poem lacks consistency in tone and perspective. It shifts between mythic, geological time and immediate, present tragedy, moving from universal darkness and creation to the particular death of a child, then back to an abstract and ritualized ending. These discontinuities shifts in time, tone, and structure prevent the poem from offering a unified or coherent viewpoint. The speaker claims to reject mourning, but the poem is itself a deeply mournful and elegiac meditation, revealing a disconnection between intention and action. Furthermore, the omission of key details such as the identity of the child or the reasons for this refusal leaves interpretive gaps that resist closure. At the linguistic level, the poem questions its own use of language. The speaker denounces traditional elegiac language as a form of betrayal, yet falls into the same rhetorical strategies he critiques, using elevated, mythologizing imagery like “London’s daughter” and “robed in the long friends.” This contradiction illustrates the impossibility of escaping language’s influence, even while acknowledging its limitations. In trying not to “murder the mankind of her going with a grave truth,” Thomas ironically performs the very act he condemns offering solemn, stylized mobilization. In the end, the poem exposes its own fractures, suggesting that language not only fails to express pure grief but actively complicates it. Thus, through the verbal, textual, and linguistic stages, the poem demonstrates the core principle of deconstruction: that meaning is always unstable, fractured, and deferred.

➡️ References: 

Barad, Dilip. “Deconstructive Analysis of Ezra Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro' and William Carlos Williams's 'The Red Wheelbarrow.'” Research Gate, 03 July 2024, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381943844_Deconstructive_Analysis_of_Ezra_Pound's_'In_a_Station_of_the_Metro'_and_William_Carlos_Williams's_'The_Red_Wheelbarrow'. Accessed 03 July 2024.

Dilip  Barad. Deconstructive Reading of Sonnet 18, youtu.be/ohY-w4cMhRM?feature=shared. Accessed 03 July 2025.

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