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.