Hello Everyone!
This blog is part of a lab activity assigned by Dilip Barad Sir for the Thinking Activity on deconstruction. Using insights from the video "How to Deconstruct a Text: Sonnet 18 shall I compare thee?" and key ideas by Jacques Derrida, this blog explore how meaning is unstable in four poems: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 shall I compare thee? , Ezra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro, William Carlos Williams’s The Red Wheelbarrow, and Dylan Thomas’s A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.
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Sonnet 18 Shall I Compare Thee?
Deconstructive Reading of the poem
At first glance, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 appears to offer a stable and confident comparison, claiming the beloved’s beauty will last forever through the poet’s verse. However, from a deconstructive perspective, this promise of immortality begins to unravel. The poem sets up oppositions between summer and the beloved, time and eternity, death and poetic life but these binaries are not stable. The idea of an “eternal summer” is itself built upon the unstable symbol of summer, which the poem describes as too short, too hot, and often dimmed. The speaker tries to transcend natural decay by preserving beauty in language, but language itself is fluid, shifting, and historically rooted in interpretation. where concepts celebrity, politics, nature, and poetry melted into one another, the so-called permanence in Shakespeare’s lines is dependent on a system of signs that are always open to change.
Moreover, the poem subtly reveals its anxiety about impermanence, even as it claims to conquer it. The threat of death remains present “Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade” suggesting that the beloved must still be defended against it. In this way, the poem’s own confidence is undercut by its reliance on what it tries to overcome. The assertion that the verse will live “so long as men can breathe or eyes can see” ironically admits its own limits, tying immortality to human existence, which is itself fragile. Like the stream-of-consciousness narrative that resists fixed meaning, the sonnet too becomes a space where meaning is deferred and dependent on the reader. Rather than guaranteeing eternal life, the poem exposes the fragility of beauty, memory, and language and in doing so, deconstructs its own central claim.
‘On a Station in the Metro’ by Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Here is AI generated image of the poem :
Petals on a wet, black bough. Here is AI generated image of the poem :
Deconstruction reading of the poem :
Ezra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro at first appears to present a clear, beautiful image: the fleeting faces in a crowded urban scene compared to delicate petals. However, a deconstructive reading shows that this clarity is an illusion. The word “apparition” introduces a ghostly, uncertain presence something that is both there and not there drawing attention to absence rather than presence. The poem’s meaning becomes unstable as it plays with binary oppositions like nature vs. civilization, fragile vs. solid, and presence vs. absence. These oppositions are not fixed but constantly shift, undermining any stable interpretation. The poem reflects modern life’s fragmented nature, using brief, isolated images to suggest unity but a unity that is haunted by uncertainty and loss.
Furthermore, the poem emphasizes the musical and visual structure the spacing, rhythm, and near-rhymes drawing readers into a sensual experience that resists logical meaning. This aligns with Kristeva’s idea of the semiotic, where sound disrupts rationality and engages the unconscious.
Yet, beyond Kristeva, deconstruction focuses on how language itself cannot offer real presence, only signs pointing to absence. The poem invites multiple interpretations (multiplicity of meanings), challenges traditional hierarchies (valuing petals as equal to people), and depends on the reader’s role in making meaning. Rather than offering a fixed message, the poem exposes how poetic language creates meaning through difference, instability, and ambiguity revealing the fragility not just of life, but of meaning itself.
The Red Wheelbarrow
a red wheelbarrowglazed with rainwaterbeside the whitechickens
Deconstruction reading of the poem :
At surface level, "The Red Wheelbarrow" appears to emphasize the materiality of ordinary objects a wheelbarrow, rainwater, and chickens suggesting that meaning and beauty can be found in the simplest elements of daily life. However, from a deconstructive perspective, this seemingly straightforward poem reveals a complex interplay between language, meaning, and interpretation. The poem appears to celebrate presence, but its meaning is deferred, slippery, and shaped by the reader’s interaction with the text rather than any fixed reality.
The colors “red” and “white” may look like they represent real objects, yet they exist only in language as signifiers pointing to absent referents. Meaning here is not stable but exists in a state of différance (Derrida’s idea that meaning is always deferred and created through difference). The wheelbarrow, chickens, and rain are not directly "seen", but constructed by the reader’s imagination. As such, the poem questions the referential power of language, showing that words cannot fully capture reality. The structure and rhythm of the poem short lines, broken phrases act as a supplement that adds meaning through form, not just content, making the act of reading itself part of the meaning.
The poem also evokes intertextuality, where different readers might recall other texts, memories, or images, further multiplying interpretation. This leads to undecidability the poem can be read both as a simple scene and as a commentary on the impossibility of simple meaning. It undermines binary oppositions like reality/imagination, word/thing, center/periphery, by showing how these categories blur. Through its minimalist style and textual playfulness, the poem resists any single, fixed “metanarrative” and opens up space for marginal or overlooked interpretations, including cultural, ecological, or emotional readings. The contextual instability of the poem how its meaning can change depending on time, reader, or perspective makes it a powerful example of reader-response theory within deconstruction.
'A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London' by Dylan Thomas
At first glance, Dylan Thomas’s poem appears to reject traditional mourning and elegy, presenting the child’s death not as a personal tragedy but as a sacred, natural transformation. The speaker claims to “refuse to mourn,” suggesting that grief expressed through language would diminish the sacredness of her passing. The poem instead associates the child with the elemental and eternal darkness, water, and nature giving her death a mythic, universal dimension. The rich symbolism and elevated diction referring to her as “London’s daughter” and describing her return to the earth imply reverence rather than sorrow. Structurally, the poem moves from cosmic imagery to the moment of death, and then to a timeless conclusion, reflecting a vision that transcends individual loss. This reading aligns with a structuralist interpretation: the poem is unified in theme and tone, offering a solemn, dignified response to tragedy.
However, a deconstructive reading exposes contradictions that unravel this coherence. The poem’s very act of commemorating the child contradicts its stated refusal to mourn language becomes both the site of denial and expression. The final line, “After the first death, there is no other,” is paradoxical: by naming a “first” death, it implies the possibility of a second, undermining its own assertion. Likewise, the speaker criticizes conventional mourning as a “murder” of truth, yet resorts to metaphor and elevated rhetoric, falling into the very discourses he condemns. The poem’s shifts in time, tone, and perspective from elemental eternity to present tragedy and historical memory create discontinuity, not unity. The absence of personal detail about the child, the refusal to explain the speaker’s stance, and the grand symbolic language all point to repression and internal conflict. Thus, the poem becomes an example of language’s instability it tries to transcend mourning but is trapped within the very structures it critiques. In deconstructive terms, the poem reveals its own fractures, its unresolved tensions, and the impossibility of fixing stable meaning in the face of grief.
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 2025.
Barad, D. (2023, July 23). How to Deconstruct a Text. Bhavngar, Gujarat, India: DoEMKBU YouTube Channel. Retrieved 7 3, 2024, from https://youtu.be/JDWDIEpgMGI?si=WnmtixfH9lFYj-bJ
Belsey, C. (2002). Poststructuralism (First Indian Edition 2006 ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Pound, E. (1913, April). In a Station of a Metro. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Retrieved 7 3, 2024, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12675/in-astation-of-the-metro
Williams, W. C. (1938). The Red Wheelbarrow. In C. MacGowan (Ed.), The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939. New Directions Publishing Corporation. Retrieved 7 3, 2024, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45502/the-red-wheelbarrow
At surface level, "The Red Wheelbarrow" appears to emphasize the materiality of ordinary objects a wheelbarrow, rainwater, and chickens suggesting that meaning and beauty can be found in the simplest elements of daily life. However, from a deconstructive perspective, this seemingly straightforward poem reveals a complex interplay between language, meaning, and interpretation. The poem appears to celebrate presence, but its meaning is deferred, slippery, and shaped by the reader’s interaction with the text rather than any fixed reality.
The colors “red” and “white” may look like they represent real objects, yet they exist only in language as signifiers pointing to absent referents. Meaning here is not stable but exists in a state of différance (Derrida’s idea that meaning is always deferred and created through difference). The wheelbarrow, chickens, and rain are not directly "seen", but constructed by the reader’s imagination. As such, the poem questions the referential power of language, showing that words cannot fully capture reality. The structure and rhythm of the poem short lines, broken phrases act as a supplement that adds meaning through form, not just content, making the act of reading itself part of the meaning.
The poem also evokes intertextuality, where different readers might recall other texts, memories, or images, further multiplying interpretation. This leads to undecidability the poem can be read both as a simple scene and as a commentary on the impossibility of simple meaning. It undermines binary oppositions like reality/imagination, word/thing, center/periphery, by showing how these categories blur. Through its minimalist style and textual playfulness, the poem resists any single, fixed “metanarrative” and opens up space for marginal or overlooked interpretations, including cultural, ecological, or emotional readings. The contextual instability of the poem how its meaning can change depending on time, reader, or perspective makes it a powerful example of reader-response theory within deconstruction.
At first glance, Dylan Thomas’s poem appears to reject traditional mourning and elegy, presenting the child’s death not as a personal tragedy but as a sacred, natural transformation. The speaker claims to “refuse to mourn,” suggesting that grief expressed through language would diminish the sacredness of her passing. The poem instead associates the child with the elemental and eternal darkness, water, and nature giving her death a mythic, universal dimension. The rich symbolism and elevated diction referring to her as “London’s daughter” and describing her return to the earth imply reverence rather than sorrow. Structurally, the poem moves from cosmic imagery to the moment of death, and then to a timeless conclusion, reflecting a vision that transcends individual loss. This reading aligns with a structuralist interpretation: the poem is unified in theme and tone, offering a solemn, dignified response to tragedy.
However, a deconstructive reading exposes contradictions that unravel this coherence. The poem’s very act of commemorating the child contradicts its stated refusal to mourn language becomes both the site of denial and expression. The final line, “After the first death, there is no other,” is paradoxical: by naming a “first” death, it implies the possibility of a second, undermining its own assertion. Likewise, the speaker criticizes conventional mourning as a “murder” of truth, yet resorts to metaphor and elevated rhetoric, falling into the very discourses he condemns. The poem’s shifts in time, tone, and perspective from elemental eternity to present tragedy and historical memory create discontinuity, not unity. The absence of personal detail about the child, the refusal to explain the speaker’s stance, and the grand symbolic language all point to repression and internal conflict. Thus, the poem becomes an example of language’s instability it tries to transcend mourning but is trapped within the very structures it critiques. In deconstructive terms, the poem reveals its own fractures, its unresolved tensions, and the impossibility of fixing stable meaning in the face of grief.
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