Deconstructive analysis...
This blog is based on Deconstructive analysis of Ezra Pound's ' In a station of the Metro' ,William Shakespeare's Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?,William Carlos Williams’s poem "The Red Wheelbarrow",Dylan Thomas, 'A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London'. This task was assigned by Dilip Barad sir.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
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.
Analysis :
The video talks about poetry, language, and how we understand meaning. It uses ideas from Jacques Derrida, a famous thinker, and focuses on deconstruction a way to look at texts by questioning fixed meanings.
Beloved represent human beings and Summer’s Day represent nature so here also we can see the binary opposition and here, I - is poet himself / beloved/ celebrating self.
The main idea is that meaning is not stable. Words and poems can mean different things to different people. This is called "free play"a term from Derrida that shows how language is flexible and open to many interpretations.
Poems (like those by Shakespeare and modern poets) are used to explore ideas of identity, beauty, nature, and life. The speaker also says that language is connected to power, and it can shape or resist culture and politics.
The video dives into how poetry expresses identity, emotion, and even social power. When we read a line about love or nature, it’s not just about beauty it’s also about how we see ourselves and the world. Poems can hold ideas about race, gender, class, and politics even when they seem simple.
One powerful idea the video highlights is "free play"meaning language is full of possibilities. Instead of finding one "true" meaning in a poem, we can explore many. That makes reading exciting and personal.
The Primacy of the Signifier
"In a Station of the Metro":
Analysis :
Pound connects the faces in a crowd to petals on a branch. You might think these are real images we can picture in our minds so they are more than just words, right?
But actually, the poem highlights how language (signifiers) separates and focuses our attention. It pulls these images out of real-life noise and sets them side-by-side in a fresh way. The poem makes us think about fragility (petals/faces), darkness (bough/crowd), and contrast (big crowd vs. small faces, dark vs. light). The word "apparition" gives a ghostly feeling before we even get to the delicate “petals.” That eerie quality comes from language, not reality.
Even the way the poem looks and sounds matters. The lines are short, floating on the page. There’s soft rhyme and rhythm. This all adds to the poetic effect.
Julia Kristeva explains this as the "semiotic" the musical, rhythmic part of language that exists before meaning. She links it to the sounds babies make before they learn words. Poetry, for her, taps into this deeper, emotional layer that’s connected to pleasure and desire or even death.
Deconstructive Analysis:
- Primacy of the Signifier
- Words like “faces,” “crowd,” “petals,” “bough” don’t directly represent things. They gain meaning through comparison and contrast.
- Parallels and Differences
- Faces are compared to petals. Both are delicate and momentary. The contrast between the urban crowd and natural petals creates layers of meaning.
- The Power of “Apparition”
- “Apparition” suggests something ghostly this makes the faces feel unreal or fleeting.
- Form and Rhythm
- The two short lines, visually separated on the page, add a musical rhythm and poetic effect.
- Julia Kristeva's Semiotic
- Kristeva talks about the semiotic the rhythm and sound in language that goes beyond logical meaning. This poem is a good example.
What Deconstruction Reveals:
- The poem allows many meanings to emerge.
- It plays with absence and presence: the faces are there, but like ghosts.
It blends nature and city, disrupts traditional oppositions, and emphasizes how the reader’s role shapes meaning.
William Carlos Williams’s poem "The Red Wheelbarrow":
Analysis :
At first, it seems to describe simple, physical things a red wheelbarrow, rainwater, white chickens. But look again: everything is clean, shiny, and almost too perfect. There’s no mud, mess, or shadow. It feels more like a child’s picture book or a memory of purity not a real farm. The poem’s rhythm is very simple and repetitive, adding to that innocent feel.
So, just like Pound’s poem, this one also doesn’t give us real things. Instead, it shows how language creates images. That red wheelbarrow isn’t from the world it’s from poetry.
Deconstructive Analysis:
- Surface Meaning
- Seems like a simple image just objects: a wheelbarrow, water, chickens.
- Deeper Deconstructive View:
- Différance: Meaning is delayed and always shifting. “Red” and “white” don’t mean the same to everyone.
- Undecidability: Is this real or just an image created by words?
- Supplementarity: The way the poem is arranged adds to its meaning form matters as much as words.
What Deconstruction Reveals:
- The poem questions whether language can fully represent reality.
- Its meaning is never fixed it depends on the reader and the context.
- It blurs the line between imagination and reality.
Even simple things like chickens and rainwater gain poetic and symbolic weight through the play of words.
Both poems play with presence and absence, form and meaning, and challenge the idea that language simply reflects reality. Meaning, here, is something we help create not something we’re just given.
In the end, deconstruction doesn't destroy the poem it enriches it, reminding us that poetry is not about fixed answers, but about feeling, rhythm, contradiction, and imagination.
How Deconstruction Reads Between the Lines (and Tears Them Apart)
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.
(Source: Collected Poems 1934-52, Dent)
That’s what post-structuralist critics and deconstructionists love to explore. They read a poem not just for what it says, but for what it hides, contradicts, or doesn’t say at all.
For example, Dylan Thomas’s powerful poem "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" claims not to mourn… but the entire poem is a haunting, emotional tribute. Strange, right? That’s exactly the kind of contradiction deconstruction looks for. It’s not a mistake it’s a clue.
Deconstruction happens in three steps:
- Verbal – Find word-level contradictions or paradoxes. Like calling a death the “first” when you say there won’t be another.
- Textual – Look at bigger shifts in tone or time. Thomas jumps from deep time to the present and then to London’s history, making the meaning feel scattered and unstable.
- Linguistic – Ask: can language even do what the poet wants? Thomas rejects poetic mourning and then uses poetic language anyway.
By doing this, deconstruction shows us that language isn’t just a tool for expressing meaning it’s a force that shapes, twists, and even confuses meaning. Every word carries history, emotion, and even hidden battles between what we say and what we mean.
So next time you read a poem, don’t just look at the message listen for what it can’t say. That’s where deconstruction lives in the gaps, the silences, and the ghosts of meaning.
References :
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