"Poetry and Poststructuralism: Derridean Analysis of Imagery, Form, and Meaning"

Hello everyone!

This Blog is a part of Lab Activity which based  on the concept of Deconstructive Reading, using four different poems, which given by Dr. Dilip Barad Sir so, Each of these poems challenges traditional meanings in unique ways. Below, I have shared my own understanding and point of view on these poems:

1. “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” by William Shakespeare

2. “In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound

3. “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams

4. “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” by Dylan Thomas

These poems, when read through a deconstructive lens, open up multiple meanings, hidden contradictions, and invite us to question the fixed ideas of beauty, death, imagery, and language itself, and for more information  Click here so first poem is, 

1) “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” by William Shakespeare

"Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."

👉🏻     Sonnet 18  by Shakespeare and here, my understading as deconstruction reading about In Sonnet 18, Shakespeare tries to praise someone’s beauty by comparing them to a summer’s day, but through deconstructive reading, we see that even he admits summer is not perfect—sometimes rough, short, or too hot—so the comparison itself becomes weak. He says the person’s beauty will live forever through this poem, but language is never stable or fixed; meanings can change, readers may forget, and even the poem can lose its power. Words like “eternal” and “fair” seem strong but actually have unclear, shifting meanings. So, what looks like a confident love poem is full of contradictions and doubts—showing that nothing, not even poetry or beauty, is truly permanent.

And now, here the second poem is,

2)  "In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound: 

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough."

In this short poem, Pound shows us two images: faces in a metro crowd and petals on a wet, black bough. At first, it looks like a simple comparison—but when I read it with Derrida’s deconstruction theory, I realized that the meaning is not fixed at all. The word "apparition" doesn’t just mean "appearance"—it also means ghost, fading, or something not fully present. So, the faces are not fully "there"—they are ghost-like, half-visible in the rush of city life.

The second image—“petals on a wet, black bough”—comes from nature, but here it’s used to describe urban people. That contrast between nature and city, soft petals and hard black branch, becomes unstable. The more I read, the more I feel that these two images are not opposite but connected, and that connection is always shifting. The poem plays with binary oppositions—like nature vs. civilization, presence vs. absence, individual vs. crowd—and undermines them.

Words like “faces,” “crowd,” “petals,” and “bough” are just signifiers. They don’t point to any one fixed meaning—they work by differences and relationships with each other. What Pound shows us is not a final truth, but a moment of feeling, a flash of beauty in everyday life that can’t be captured completely in words.

So in my point of view, this poem is not just a visual image—it’s a game of language and feeling. It tells me that meaning is never final, and every time I read it, I feel something new. That’s why this poem becomes more beautiful in deconstructive reading—because it opens many possibilities, not just one fixed meaning. 

So now, we are moving ahead about last two poems is third one,

3) “The Red Wheelbarrow” By William Carlos Williams (from my point of view, through Derridean lens)

"so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens"

At first, this poem looks so simple—a red wheelbarrow, rainwater, and white chickens. But when I read it through deconstruction, I realize this simplicity is actually full of complexity. The poem starts with “so much depends upon...” but what exactly depends on this wheelbarrow? The sentence never tells us clearly. That’s where the poem becomes undecidable—we are left to fill in the meaning ourselves.

Words like “red” and “white” are not just colors—they are signifiers. Their meanings shift depending on how I feel, what I imagine, or even which cultural background I come from. Derrida’s idea of “différance” explains that meanings are always delayed and depend on other words—we never get a final truth. So even “a red wheel / barrow” becomes something more than just a farm tool; it's an image full of emotional or symbolic possibilities.

The poem also blurs the line between language and reality. Is this just a scene being described? Or is it a constructed image made out of language? Deconstruction shows that we can’t trust language to give us a direct truth—it’s always filtered. Even the form—the way the lines break, the repetition of two-word lines—is not random. It becomes part of the meaning, showing how much structure shapes understanding.

For me, this poem makes me slow down and think: why is something so ordinary made so important? Maybe it's not about the wheelbarrow itself, but how language can make anything meaningful—or meaningless—depending on how we read it. That’s the beauty of deconstruction: meaning doesn’t live inside the poem—it lives in our interaction with it.

4) “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” by Dylan Thomas

👉🏻     So here, the last poem by Dylan Thomas's  Though the poem claims silence, its language mourns deeply — exposing contradiction between intention and expression.

It dismantles stable meaning, showing how language both resists and performs mourning at once.

This poem by Dylan Thomas says it will not mourn, but actually becomes a mourning poem, full of emotion and deep imagery. The line “After the first death there is no other” contradicts itself—if it's the first, there must be more. Words like never and until clash, showing how language breaks down.

The poem shifts time and focus—from cosmic death to a child in London—making it hard to find one clear meaning. Thomas rejects poetic clichés, but still uses symbolic language like “London’s daughter”, falling into the same language trap he wants to avoid.

So in my view, this poem shows how language cannot fully express death or grief, and how meaning always slips away—just like Derrida says. It’s not just about mourning—it’s about the impossibility of saying anything final. 

References:

Barad  Dilip (ed.) (2024) (PDF) deconstructive analysis of Ezra Pound’s ‘in a station of the Metro’ and William Carlos Williams’s ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, ResearchGate. Available at: 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: 04 July 2025).

   Belsey, C. (2002). Poststructuralism (First Indian Edition 2006 ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

       DoE-MKBU. (2020b, July 12). Deconstructive Reading of Sonnet 18 | [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved July 4, 2025, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohY-w4cMhRM

      

      Ezra Pound. (1913, April). Poetry Foundation. Retrieved July 4, 2025, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12675/in-astation-of-the-metro

   Williams Carols William (1938) The Red Wheelbarrow, Poetry Foundation. Available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45502/the-red-wheelbarrow (Accessed: 04 July 2025). 

Thank you.