Monday, 6 July 2026

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

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


This blog is written as a task assigned by the head of the Department of English (MKBU), Prof. and Dr. Dilip Barad Sir. Here is the link to the professor's research article for background reading: Click here.

To see how these deconstruction techniques apply to AI-generated poetry, you can read my follow-up post here: [ Lab Activity: Poetry and Poststructuralism: An AI-Powered Analysis]

Here is the mind map of my blog: Click Here

Introduction:

In this blog, we apply a deconstructive lens to four major poems from vastly different contexts: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, Pound’s "In a Station of the Metro," Williams’s "The Red Wheelbarrow," and Thomas’s "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London." Abandoning the search for a single, stable theme, this analysis highlights the hidden paradoxes, theoretical assumptions, and linguistic conflicts at work beneath the surface of the verses. By reading each poem as a fluid exchange of signs, we dismantle traditional interpretations and reveal how meaning is constantly delayed, argued, and reinvented. Ultimately, by focusing on overturned binaries and rhetorical shifts, this blog reveals how post-structuralist theory completely reshapes our approach to reading and interpreting poetry.

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Poem 1: Deconstructive Reading of Sonnet 18:‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’



Sonnet 18 (Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction by Catherine Belsey)Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’, is one of his most popular poems. People read it out at weddings (though not as often as Sonnet 116) in lyrical celebration of an ideal romance. Will writes it for Viola in John Madden’s film Shakespeare in Love (1998). The poem seems to turn on a binary comparison between the beloved and the summer’s day, in which the beloved is always the privileged term: Thou art more lovely and more temperate’. By contrast with the loved one, the weather is never quite right: ‘Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May’; the temperature is either too hot or too cold. Besides, the products of the season are perfect only for a moment, while Thy eternal summer shall not fade’. But what is the condition of this timeless perfection? Writing! The beloved is immune to decline and death only When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st’. The poem itself, it turns out, is what endows the mortal human being with immortality: ‘So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’. Sonnet 18, in other words, celebrates its own power to confer eternity. The binary opposition, then, is not quite as simple as it first appeared. Thou’ and the summer day, distinguished as antithetical, now appear on the same side of a line that divides mortality from poetry. All that lives is transitory, including the beloved: ‘Every fair from fair sometime declines’. Just like the summer day, the living object of the poet’s desire will, after all, fade and die: eternity belongs only to the poem and the poem’s inscription of love. But if love and summer resemble one another after all, in contrast to writing, which alone has immortal powers, what are we to make of the excess heat and cold of the summer day? Are they also properties the season shares with human love? Does the Sonnet imply that love too is very rarely, in practice, just right? And the rough winds that shake the darling buds? Are they, perhaps, sexy? Or at least tempestuous, the element of passion that makes love itself anything but ‘temperate’?The other invades the selfsame. The qualities of the repudiated summer day return to inhabit the romance they seemed designed to define by contrast.

Here is the link of my activity: Click Here

For our TED-Ed activity, Sir gave us an open question about Sonnet 18, and my answer to it is provided below:

What exactly, according to you, does Sonnet 18 mean to say?

My Response:

The core tension of Sonnet 18 rests on an unsettling paradox: the beloved must textually die in order to achieve poetic immortality. The sonnet systematically devalues the lived, physical reality of the human subject aligning it with the volatile, decaying cycles of nature in order to justify its replacement by a linguistic artifact. This creates an unstable hierarchy where the poet claims sovereign jurisdiction over time itself. However, a poststructuralist reading exposes the frailty of this monument. The eternity promised by the final couplet is immediately compromised by the shifting nature of reading and interpretation, leaving the poem's true motive suspended between sincere devotion and a calculated exercise in artistic narcissism.

Poem 2: Deconstructing Ezra Pound’s "In a Station of the Metro"  

Source: nightcafe

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. (Pound, 1913)




Honestly, when I read this poem, it feels less like reading and more like looking at a quick photograph. Ezra Pound is basically taking this busy, crowded subway station and making it feel quiet and beautiful by comparing it to nature.

Here is how I make sense of it:

In the first line - "The apparition of these faces in the crowd" - using the word "apparition" makes everyone seem kind of like ghosts. You know how when you're in a crowded train station, people's faces just blur past you? You see them for a split second, and then they disappear into the mass of people. They feel totally temporary.

Then, in the second line - "Petals on a wet, black bough" - he compares those random, pale faces to delicate flower petals stuck to a dark, wet tree branch after it rains. I like to imagine the dark subway tunnel, or the train itself, as that "wet, black bough." The human faces are the bright, fragile petals popping out against all that heavy darkness.


Petals on a wet, black bough.
Source: StockCake

My Interpretation:

Basically, to me, this poem is about finding a quick flash of beauty in a dark, cold, man-made place. Even though city life is usually rushed and impersonal, catching a quick glimpse of people's faces can actually be really beautiful, just like looking at a fragile flower in nature. It completely changes how you look at an ordinary, everyday commute.

Other Source:

Most study guides explain this poem as a quick snapshot of finding beauty in a busy, modern city. When the poet sees people's faces flashing by in a gloomy subway station, they look a bit like ghosts appearing and disappearing. He compares these pale faces standing out in the dark station to bright, soft flower petals stuck on a wet, black tree branch. The main idea is that human life is short and fragile, but even in a cold, crowded, everyday place like a train station, you can still spot sudden, quiet moments of natural beauty.

Catherine Belsey's Analysis: The Primacy of the "Signifier"

Catherine Belsey’s poststructuralist approach to Ezra Pound’s "In a Station of the Metro" shifts our attention away from the literal, real-world subway station and focuses instead on the mechanics of the language itself. Rather than looking through the words to picture a physical scene, Belsey looks directly at the words on the page. She argues that the poem generates its power not by describing reality, but through the contrast, rhythm, and ghostly associations of the words themselves. This perspective can be broken down into four main concepts:  

Words Over Reality: Instead of focusing on the actual, physical subway station, Belsey argues that the poem forces us to look at the words themselves ("signifiers"). By removing the real-world background "noise," the poem highlights feelings like the vulnerability of the faces rather than describing a literal place.

Power of Contrast: The poem generates meaning through the stark differences between words. It forces us to connect opposites, contrasting large crowds with small faces, and dark, heavy branches with pale, fragile petals. 

Ghostly Language: The specific use of the word "apparition" creates a haunting, ghost-like mood. This eerie feeling comes entirely from the language itself, completely separate from any physical reality.

The Music of the Text: The poem's visual isolation on the blank page, its near-rhymes (like "crowd" and "bough"), and its shifting rhythms create a powerful musical effect. This musicality works directly on our senses and emotions, disrupting logical thought before we even analyze the literal meaning of the words.  


Source: ChatGPT/DALL·E 3 - Representational

so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens.  (Williams, 1938)



My Interpretation: The Art of the Ordinary

When I first read William Carlos Williams’s The Red Wheelbarrow, I was struck by how little there actually is on the page yet, it feels so heavy with meaning. It’s not trying to be complicated or philosophical; it’s just a snapshot of a farm. But that’s exactly why I find it so interesting.

The poem is a reminder that beauty is not just in grand ideas, but in the simple, material objects that support our daily existence. By isolating them on the page, Williams makes the ordinary world seem new again.

Ultimately, I think this poem is a reminder that we don't always need grand metaphors to find meaning. Sometimes, the most powerful thing a poet can do is strip away the noise and just show us the world as it is. It makes me realize that if I just pay enough attention to the "solid" things around me, there’s a whole lot of beauty in the everyday.

Other Source:

Most study guides explain this poem as a quick picture of how much we need ordinary, everyday things. When the poet looks at a simple farm scene, he makes us slow down and really notice the tools we usually ignore. He describes a bright red wheelbarrow, left shiny and wet from the rain, sitting right next to some white chickens. The main idea is that we depend on farming and hard work to survive, but it is also important to stop and enjoy the simple, quiet beauty found in these common objects.

Belsey’s Analysis:

"Belsey identifies two distinct ways of reading this text: the initial illusion of referentiality and the subsequent revelation of the poem's linguistic artifice."

Catherine Belsey argues that the poem acts as a "language trap." It invites the reader to believe in a real-world object, only to reveal that the object is actually a linguistic invention.

  • The Illusion (Materiality): At first, the poem feels incredibly "real." By avoiding metaphors and using sharp, clear colors, it tricks the reader into thinking the poem is a direct window into a physical farmyard, anchored by the opening claim that "so much depends" on these objects.

  • The Deconstruction (The Turn): Belsey points out that this reality is too perfect to be true. A real farm has mud, shadows, and grime; this poem has only "glazed" brightness. It feels more like a clean illustration in a children’s book than a working farm.

  • The Conclusion (Language over Reality): Because the scene is idealized and "unreal," Belsey concludes that the poem does not describe a physical wheelbarrow at all. Instead, the wheelbarrow is an artifact of language.

Ultimately, the "reality" of the poem is not found in a barnyard, but in the reader's own mind, created entirely by the specific words on the page.


 
                                                     Source: ChatGPT/DALL·E 3 - Representational

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.



My Interpretation:

When I read this, it didn't feel like a standard, gloomy poem about grief. To me, the whole point is that the speaker refuses to mourn the "normal" way for a child killed in a bombing. He feels that typical crying and sad words would actually disrespect her memory.

Here is how I understand the poem, part by part:

The Promise (Stanzas 1 & 2): He makes a massive promise. He basically says, "I refuse to cry or mourn until the literal end of the world."

The Reason (Stanza 3): He explains why he won't mourn. He feels that writing a typical, sad poem about how "innocent" she was would actually cheapen her death. Her passing is too profound for cheap clichés.

Returning to Nature (Stanza 4): Instead of focusing on the tragedy, he finds peace knowing she is safely buried in the earth. She is no longer a victim; she is resting peacefully with everyone who has died before her.

The Final Message: The last line, "After the first death, there is no other," really stuck with me. My interpretation is that once you die, your suffering stops completely. You become part of the earth, and you can never be hurt by bombs or war ever again.

Other Source:

Most study guides explain this poem as a powerful rejection of traditional grief in the face of a horrific wartime tragedy. When the poet reflects on a young girl killed in the London bombings, he zeroes in on a cosmic vow, promising to withhold his tears until the literal end of the universe. He paints a sweeping picture of the child bypassing religious ceremonies to rest deep within the earth, merging seamlessly with the soil, the Thames river, and everyone who has ever died before her. The main idea is that softening her tragic death with standard, comforting elegies would actually disrespect her raw dignity reminding us that while death is brutally final, returning to nature brings an ultimate, untouchable peace where one can never be hurt again.

A Deconstructive Reading of Dylan Thomas's "A Refusal to Mourn": Applying the Framework of Peter Barry's Beginning Theor:

In standard liberal humanist readings, Dylan Thomas’s "A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London" is often praised as a highly crafted, unified elegy that paradoxically honors the dead by refusing to rely on cliché sentiments of grief. However, when subjected to the deconstructive pressures of post-structuralist criticism specifically utilizing the three-stage verbal, textual, and linguistic model outlined in Peter Barry's Beginning Theory the poem’s apparent structural unity begins to fracture. By reading the text against itself and examining its underlying aporias, shifting temporal perspectives, and reliance on the very quasi-liturgical rhetoric it consciously condemns, the poem reveals a divided "textual subconscious". Ultimately, a deconstructive reading demonstrates that the poem cannot stabilize its own inherent contradictions, transforming it from a cohesive tribute into a fascinating enactment of language's endemic unreliability.  

I. The Verbal Stage

The verbal stage resembles conventional close reading but specifically searches for paradoxes, contradictions, and the reversal of binary oppositions at the purely verbal level.

  • Paradox and Contradiction: The final line, "After the first death, there is no other," is a self-refuting statement. The use of the word "first" inherently implies a sequence (second, third, etc.), yet the phrase denies that any sequence will follow. A similar paradox is established at the very beginning of the poem with the tension between the absolute words "Never" and "until."

  • Reversal of Binary Oppositions: Post-structuralism often reverses common binary oppositions (like light/dark or life/death), privileging the second term over the first. In Thomas's poem, darkness rather than light is portrayed as the force that engenders life. The text describes an "all humbling darkness" that is "mankind making" and "Fathering," which reflects a world that is simultaneously recognizable and an inversion of our own.

II. The Textual Stage

The textual stage moves beyond individual phrases to look for larger shifts, breaks, or "fault-lines" in the poem's continuity, such as changes in time, focus, or viewpoint.

  • Shifts in Time and Perspective: The poem does not follow a smooth chronological progression, making it difficult to ground the meaning in a single perspective. The first two stanzas focus on the passing of geological aeons and the "end of the world" context. The third stanza abruptly shifts to the present and the specific, immediate event: "The majesty and burning of the child's death". Finally, the fourth stanza shifts again to a broad historical perspective regarding the recorded history of London and the "unmourning water" of the Thames.

  • Absences and Omissions: Deconstruction also looks at what the text glosses over or passes over in silence. A major omission in this text is that the poet never actually explains why he refuses to mourn, nor does he explain why this stated intention fails to be carried out.

III. The Linguistic Stage

The linguistic stage focuses on moments where the adequacy and reliability of language itself as a medium of communication are called into question.

  • The Language Trap (Aporia): The poem is built upon a fundamental aporia (an unresolvable contradiction): the text does exactly what it says it will not do. The speaker proclaims a refusal to mourn, yet the poem itself is a highly crafted act of mourning.

  • Rhetorical Contradiction: In the third stanza, the speaker condemns accepted, cliché ways of speaking about death, stating he will not "murder / The mankind of her going with a grave truth" and professes to stand outside standard elegiac stances. However, instead of remaining silent, he immediately falls into the "language trap" in the final stanza.

  • Liturgical Language: The final stanza utilizes the exact solemn, quasi-liturgical oratorical strategies he just rejected. He elevates the dead child into a larger-than-life heroic figure, naming her "London's daughter" (an impossible designation in her actual life) and claiming she is "Robed" and reunited with Mother Earth. The poet exposes the inadequacy of these rhetorical strategies, only to be forced by language to use them anyway.

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