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

 This blog is part of Lab Activity: Poststructuralism, Poems, and Gen AI: Deconstructive Reading. Assign by Pro. Dilip Barad Sir to enhance our practical understanding about Deconstruction of Poem. Here is the link of task .

Poem : 1

This video is a about reflection on deconstruction in literature, particularly focusing on Jacques Derrida’s concepts and their application to poetry. The speaker discusses how meaning in literature is never fixed, but always shifting due to the unstable nature of language. They emphasize Derrida’s idea of “free play”, where words do not point to a single truth but interact in complex, often contradictory ways. Through examples like Shakespeare’s sonnets and other poems, the speaker explores how poetry often says one thing but implies another—highlighting contradictions, paradoxes, and omissions. For instance, a poem might claim not to speak about love or beauty, yet still do so through metaphor and tone. This suggests that language cannot escape the structures it wants to challenge. The speaker also touches on the idea that deconstruction questions traditional oppositions, like nature vs. civilization or center vs. margin, and instead gives voice to what is usually pushed to the periphery. They mention that poetry today often focuses on the self rather than nature, revealing how subjectivity and identity have become central to literary expression. Overall, the passage underlines how deconstructive reading encourages us to look beyond the surface of a poem and notice how meaning is constructed, undone, and reshaped by language itself.

Poem : 2. Ezra Pound’s  ‘On a Station in 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 uses words like faces, crowd, petals, and bough not to describe reality, but to create meaning through their relationships. The poem draws a delicate comparison between fleeting human faces and natural petals, showing beauty in contrast—urban vs. nature, noise vs. silence. The word apparition adds a ghostly, dreamlike quality. Its short, image-like form and musical rhythm evoke emotions beyond logic. Instead of giving one clear meaning, the poem opens up many interpretations, blurring the lines between nature and city, presence and absence. It captures one quiet, beautiful moment in modern chaos.

Poem : 3.  William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow"

so much depends

upon

a red wheel                           

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white 

 chickens.

At first glance, The Red Wheelbarrow seems to present solid, real objects—a wheelbarrow, rainwater, chickens—implying that “so much depends” on their physical presence. But a closer look reveals a different possibility: the colors are unshaded, the scene lacks dirt or depth, and the simplicity feels more like a toy or a children's book than a real farm. The poem may not depict reality at all, but rather a constructed, idealized image shaped by language. Its meaning depends not on things themselves, but on our imagination and the purity we project onto them.

Poem : 4. Dylan Thomas's poem 'A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London'

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.

The verbal stage focuses on contradictions within individual words or phrases. For example, the poem ends with the line “After the first death, there is no other.” This statement refutes itself—calling a death “first” implies that there could be a second, but the poet denies this. Such inner conflict reveals how language can be slippery and unstable. Another example includes the pairing of the word “until” with “never”, a paradox that suggests both duration and absence. These verbal contradictions are not accidents but signals that meaning is always uncertain and open to reinterpretation.

In the textual stage, we shift from looking at single words to examining the structure and flow of the entire poem. This involves identifying breaks in time, tone, or perspective. The poem doesn’t follow a smooth, linear timeline. Instead, it begins with vast, timeless images of the natural world ending—“the last light” and “all humbling darkness”—and then suddenly shifts to the specific moment of a child’s death in the third stanza. Then, the final stanza moves again, focusing on the historical and symbolic weight of London and the Thames. These tonal and temporal jumps suggest there is no single stable viewpoint or narrative. The poem doesn’t clearly tell us why the speaker refuses to mourn or explain the child’s identity, leaving gaps that make interpretation unstable.

Finally, the linguistic stage questions whether language itself is capable of expressing truth or emotion. The speaker says he refuses to mourn, but the entire poem is a form of mourning—deep, symbolic, and filled with reverence. He claims not to “murder the mankind of her going with a grave truth,” rejecting typical poetic expressions of grief, yet the final stanza slips into grand, ritualistic language—calling the girl “London’s daughter,” describing her as “robed” in earth. These are exactly the kinds of elevated phrases he claimed to avoid. Thus, the poem exposes language’s limits—how even when the poet resists traditional meaning, he can’t fully escape it. The poem falls into the very traps it tries to reject, showing how meaning is constructed and always in tension.

  

References :

Belsey, Catherine. Post-Structuralism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2006.

Barry, Peter J. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester University Press, 2007.

Barad, Dilip. (PDF) Deconstructive Analysis of Ezra Pound’s “in a Station of the Metro” and William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” 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 4 July 2025. 

MKBU, DoE. “Deconstructive Reading of Sonnet 18 .” YouTube, youtu.be/ohY-w4cMhRM?si=MkTnRUVb2-mmx4tK. Accessed 4 July 2025. 

Poetry and Poststructuralism: An AI-Powered Analysis

This blog is part of Lab Activity: Poststructuralism, Poems, and Gen AI: Deconstructive Reading. Assign by Pro. Dilip Barad Sir to enhance our practical understanding about Deconstruction of Poem. Here is the link of task .

Step 1: Generate Poems

Use ChatGPT to generate two poems:

• Each poem should be 3 to 4 stanzas, a sonnet, or a short poem in iambic pentameter or

heroic couplet (10-12 lines).

• Choose a topic such as Monsoon, Rain, Love, Death, Nature, Flowers, Forest,

Literature, Existentialism, Digital Humanities, or any other classical or famous

literary text (e.g., metaphysical poems, The Waste Land, Waiting for Godot, Jude the

Obscure, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Great Gatsby).

1. Forest

Beneath the vaulted leaves, the silence grows,

A deeper truth than any mortal knows.

The moss-clad roots like fingers twist and weave,

And time itself forgets to take its leave.

A fox darts past where ancient shadows lie,

While sunlight dances through the emerald sky.

The breeze recites a hymn from days of old,

More sacred than the books that priests may hold.

In Nature's chapel, wild and ever free,

The forest hums a quiet mystery.

2. Existentialism

What is the self but echoes in the void,

A fleeting thought the cosmos has employed?

No grand design, no path by heaven paved,

We walk alone, yet long to be enslaved.

Each choice we make, a burden and a gift,

A weight we bear through every silent shift.

We forge our truths from ashes of despair,

In hope that something real exists somewhere.

Yet freedom cuts as deep as sharpened steel 

To choose is pain, but proves that we can feel.

The world is blank, but we must write it bright,

And find our meaning in the self-made light.

Step 2

Study Deconstruction

• Provide general information about Poststructuralism and Deconstruction using

sources like Peter Barry's Beginning Theory, M.H. Abrams, and Wikipedia.

Poststructuralism and Deconstruction

1. General Overview of Poststructuralism

Poststructuralism emerged in the 1960s as a reaction against Structuralism, particularly in France. While Structuralism sought to understand how systems (like language) create meaning through underlying structures, Poststructuralism challenged the idea that such structures are stable, universal, or reliable.

Peter Barry – Beginning Theory:

• Barry notes that Poststructuralism shows skepticism about the idea of fixed meaning and questions the authority of language to represent reality.

• Structuralists believed in binary oppositions (e.g., good/evil), but Poststructuralists argue these binaries are unstable and culturally constructed.

• There is no "center" or ultimate truth in texts; meanings are shifting and multiple.

M.H. Abrams – A Glossary of Literary Terms:

• Poststructuralism is characterized by a distrust of totalizing theories, a critique of essentialism, and a focus on language as performative.

• It emphasizes that meaning is not given, but produced and that texts can subvert their own claims.

Wikipedia Summary:

• Poststructuralism highlights that authors cannot fully control the meaning of their texts.

• Influenced by thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and others.

• It insists that meaning is always deferred, echoing Derrida’s term différance.

---

2. Introduction to Deconstruction (by Jacques Derrida)

Deconstruction is a critical and philosophical approach founded by Jacques Derrida, often considered part of the broader Poststructuralist movement, though it is a distinct method in itself.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM: A BACKDROP TO DECONSTRUCTION

✦ General Traits (from Barry, Abrams, Wikipedia)

Reaction against Structuralism:

Structuralists believed that meaning is generated through stable binary structures (like male/female, speech/writing).

Poststructuralists, including Derrida, argue that these binaries are unstable, and meaning is never fixed.

Key Ideas:

• No final or fixed meaning in texts.
• Interpretation is infinite, subjective, and context-driven.
• Reality is not objectively represented in language; instead, language mediates reality.
• Major Thinkers: Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva.

 DECONSTRUCTION (By Jacques Derrida)

“Deconstruction is not destruction, but a method of reading that exposes the internal contradictions of a text.”

 Peter Barry (Beginning Theory, Ch. 3):

• Deconstruction shows that texts often contradict their own premises.
• Texts claim to present a clear meaning, but the language they use undermines that clarity.
• It’s a way of reading “against the grain” to find how meaning is deferred or unstable.

 M.H. Abrams:

• Deconstruction questions the "logocentric" tradition—the assumption that language has a stable center or ultimate truth.
• It challenges binary oppositions (e.g., good/evil), showing how one term is often privileged at the expense of the other.
• Derrida introduced “différance”: meaning is always deferred, not present in full at any moment.

Wikipedia Highlights (confirmed by PDF):

• Deconstruction involves “close reading” to uncover ambiguous, contradictory layers in a text.
• Derrida's famous phrase “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (“There is nothing outside the text”) means that everything is mediated by language—there's no pure, unfiltered reality.
• It has had wide influence: not just in literary theory, but also in law, architecture, feminism, and political philosophy.
• It does not aim to destroy meaning but to show that meaning is constructed and unstable.

🔹 STRUCTURALISM VS POSTSTRUCTURALISM

Structuralism	Poststructuralism / Deconstruction
Language has a stable system of signs	Language is unstable, and meaning is fluid
Emphasis on binary oppositions	Shows how binaries are arbitrary and hierarchical
Objective analysis is possible	Interpretation is subjective and open-ended
Texts have coherent meanings	Texts are self-contradictory and ambiguous

Step 3: Analyze First Poem

• Provide ChatGPT with Peter Barry's example of the deconstructive study of Dylan

Thomas’s poem using a three-step model (Verbal Stage, Textual Stage, and Linguistic

Stage).

• Input relevant information from Barry's book.

• Prompt ChatGPT to analyze your first poem using the three-step model.

 1. Verbal Stage

This stage looks for paradoxes and contradictions within phrases at a surface level.

"The silence grows" is a paradox. Silence is the absence of sound—how can it "grow"? This suggests silence is not passive but alive, pressing in. It undermines the logic of language.

"Time itself forgets"—time, a concept, is personified as forgetful. But if time forgets, then does it stop? The phrase implies a contradiction: time continues but also “forgets” to move.

"Emerald sky" contradicts natural color expectations: skies are blue, not green. This symbolic displacement deconstructs realistic description.

"More sacred than the books that priests may hold" implies a hierarchy: Nature > Scripture. But sacredness is itself a cultural-linguistic construct, and so it both relies on and denies the legitimacy of human spirituality.

These verbal contradictions show that language destabilizes the meaning it sets out to establish: sacredness, time, silence, and color are all rendered unstable through metaphor.

 2. Textual Stage

This examines shifts in tone, focus, or logic across the text, revealing its internal instability.

The poem moves from the concrete (roots, fox, breeze) to the abstract and spiritual (truth, hymn, chapel, mystery). This shift from physical to metaphysical suggests an elevation—but also a contradiction. Is the forest a real place or a spiritual realm?

The tone begins as observational (“a fox darts past...”), then turns reverent (“Nature’s chapel...”). This tonal shift suggests uncertainty in the speaker’s stance—naturalist or mystic?

There's a lack of stable temporal grounding: Time “forgets,” and “days of old” are mentioned, but there's no clear past, present, or future. Is the forest timeless or ancient? This breaks linear time and destabilizes narrative sequence.

Omission: The speaker never appears. Who is perceiving this? Is there an observer or is the forest “speaking” itself? This ambiguity in narrative voice adds to the poem’s textual indeterminacy.

These discontinuities suggest that the poem lacks a single coherent worldview. It resists framing the forest in one genre—neither fully descriptive nor purely spiritual.

3. Linguistic Stage

This stage questions whether language itself is a reliable medium of expression.

The line "a deeper truth than any mortal knows" gestures toward something beyond articulation. If it's deeper than we know, how can it be known or described? The poem gestures toward the unsayable, while still using language.

“The breeze recites a hymn” attributes language to wind—a non-human force. But recitation implies structured language and tradition, which the natural world presumably lacks. So the poem anthropomorphizes nature in order to speak about it—imposing human constructs on the non-human.

The forest is described as “wild and ever free,” but the poem’s structure—rhymed heroic couplets—contradicts this wildness with order. This suggests that the poem tames the forest in language, even as it praises its untameable nature.

By calling the forest a “chapel,” the speaker uses religious language to evoke the forest’s sanctity, but this act imports a human metaphor that contradicts the earlier assertion of Nature being beyond human systems.

 Thus, the poem undermines its own claims by using rhetorical strategies (personification, metaphor, rhyme) that limit what it attempts to free: language both reveals and traps the forest’s “mystery.”

 Final Insight (Deconstructive Reading)

Though the poem sets out to praise nature’s sacred mystery, it is caught in the very language traps it tries to transcend. It uses human logic, religious metaphor, and poetic form to depict what it claims is beyond such constructs.

So, the forest becomes not a real place, but a textual construction, built from language’s contradictions and failed metaphors. The very idea of a "truth" in the forest is deferred, never present, echoing Derrida’s différance.

Act 4 .Analyze Second Poem

• Prompt ChatGPT to study Catherine Belsey’s analyses of "The Red Wheelbarrow,"

"In a Station of the Metro," and "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?" from her

book on Poststructuralism.

• Provide clear instructions on your expectations for the analysis.

• Prompt ChatGPT to analyze your second poem based on the study.

Catherine Belsey-style Poststructuralist Reading of the Poem "Existentialism"

At first glance, the poem appears to deliver a clear philosophical position, rooted in existential freedom and the self’s responsibility to create meaning:

What is the self but echoes in the void,

A fleeting thought the cosmos has employed?

The speaker seems to question traditional metaphysics, denying divine purpose and embracing a self-fashioned identity. The poem presents a familiar existential stance: that freedom is painful, but also necessary:

Yet freedom cuts as deep as sharpened steel To choose is pain, but proves that we can feel.

And yet, a closer reading reveals that this voice of certainty might itself be less stable than it appears. Let’s consider the contradictions.

The self is likened to “echoes in the void”—ephemeral, intangible, and non-originating. This metaphor refuses solidity. How can something so elusive bear the burden of creating meaning?

The world is described as blank, and yet we are asked to “write it bright.” This final act seems noble, but it exposes its own fictionality writing is not being, and brightness is not inherent but imposed.

The poem offers no empirical referents no time, no place, no body. It asserts the power of the will, but this will operates in absence, in a universe stripped of all grounding.

And what of the form? The rhymed couplets suggest symmetry and logic, but their elegance may conceal the deeper uncertainty they carry. The speaker’s confidence relies on metaphors (“ashes,” “steel,” “void”) that are themselves unstable signs, open to multiple interpretations.

For instance:

We forge our truths from ashes of despair,

In hope that something real exists somewhere.

Here, the phrase “something real” stands in tension with “ashes”—ruin and residue. It is not knowledge, but hope, that drives the existential mission. And that hope, too, is expressed in vague, open-ended terms (“somewhere”).

So, like The Red Wheelbarrow, this poem may seem to claim truth, clarity, or vision—but what it finally reveals is how deeply dependent it is on language, metaphor, and structure to simulate what it cannot prove: the existence of a self-made meaning in a godless world.

Conclusion (in Belsey's Manner)

If we take the speaker at her word, the poem affirms the existential ideal of constructing meaning. But if we read poststructurally, the act of constructing meaning is not grounded in reality, but in the fabric of language itself.

Thus, the poem does not assert meaning, but dramatizes the struggle to sustain the illusion of meaning. Its metaphors do not point outward, to a knowable world, but inward, to the textual production of belief—an act of faith in writing, not in truth.

So, just as “so much depends” on the glazed red wheelbarrow in Williams’s poem, here everything depends on a “self-made light”—a light that, we realize, may exist only in the poem’s own language.