Hello everyone,
This blog is about responding a thinking activity task assigned by our HOD, Dr.Dilip Barad, which explores Poststructuralism, Poems, and Gen AI: Deconstructive Reading based on Derrida’s concept of ‘Deconstruction’
Deconstructive reading of Poems
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.
According to Derrida’s concept “Language bears within itself, the necessity of its own critique” let’s deconstruct this sonnet.
1.Binary Opposition
Nature vs. Art
Time vs. Poetry
In this sonnet there is binary between NATURE ( Summer, rough winds, sun , decay) POETRY (eternal lines, immortality, preservation)
The speaker claims that while natural beauty fades, the beloved's beauty will live forever in the poem.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
Derrida’s deconstruction question the stability of such binaries. If the poem must rely on ‘Natural Metaphors’ to praise the beloved, it is bound by the very nature it seeks to transcend. Here superiority of art becomes dependent on that which it devalues.
1.2 Instability of the signifier
As per Derrida’s idea of Language is not a transparent medium. One word leads to another word and that word leads to yet another and finally we never come out of the dictionary because of the illusion that we have understood. Meaning is always postponed to ultimate meaning.
This sonnet is built on signifiers but What is a “Summer’s Day?” Is it warm, bright or fleeting? And the “eye of heaven” is a metaphor for sun but also for god perhaps?
That’s why this poem’s meaning is not fixed. It is Differance shifting with every reading.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
The poem refuses narrative or context, leaving meaning suspended. Derrida would call this an instance of "différance" meaning deferred, not fixed.
The word “apparition” destabilizes the scene: Are the faces real or ghost-like? The visual and the spectral blur together, undermining the idea of stable reference.
What appears as natural (petals, bough) and social (faces, crowd) are not opposites, but overlapping signifiers without fixed referents.
The poem estranges reality, turning it into signifiers Pound does not describe people or petals, but creates a system of visual effects that floats between presence and absence. The faces aren’t in the crowd; they appear like ghosts or signs. The poem generates meaning by difference, not by referring to fixed truths. Language becomes the medium of spacing, not presence.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
Chickens
3.1 Analysis
His poem at first seems to celebrate material reality.
The line breaks and unusual spacing resist narrative and clarity, interrupting flow and meaning-making.
The poem seems to foreground language itself: each word stands apart, like signs without full context.
The vivid colors (red, white) and materials (rain water, barrow) might seem referential, but there's no narrative, no speaker only surface signs, floating, arranged.
“So much depends” but on what exactly? And why? The dependency is undefined, making the phrase a semantic dead end.
3.2 Deconstructive Reading:
The meaning “depends” on context that is not given. The wheelbarrow could be real, a toy, or symbolic, there's no fixed signified. Thus, the poem enacts the instability of language and how meaning arises not from essence but from textual difference.
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.
4.1 Analysis
The poem appears to resist traditional mourning. Instead of offering elegy, Dylan Thomas chooses silence and metaphysical abstraction. The child, who perished in the London Blitz, is absorbed into nature’s eternal cycle. The poet pledges not to mourn conventionally, but to affirm life and the mystery of death.
4.2 Deconstructive reading
4.2.1.Verbal Stage — Contradictions in Language
“After the first death, there is no other”
On the surface, it appears final and consoling. But the word “first” implies a sequence. If there is a first death, how can there be no other? The line collapses under its own contradiction.
“Never until”
Combining “never” and “until” is logically paradoxical. “Never” is absolute negation; “until” suggests something will happen eventually. This fusion of contradictory temporal signals reflects language’s inability to fix meaning securely.
“Salt seed” / “sow my salt seed”:
“Salt” makes land barren; “seed” is for fertility. This dead metaphor self-negates—what is sown is also sterile. The contradiction undermines the sacred promise of mourning through ritual.
4.2.2.Textual Stage — Shifts, Gaps, and Discontinuities
No clear speaker identity
The poem avoids typical lyric intimacy. The “I” is ambiguous, almost ritualistic or mythical, not personal. There is no defined emotional arc—only fragments of speech and sudden philosophical assertions.
Shifts in religious imagery
“Zion,” “synagogue,” “stations of the breath” invoke Abrahamic theology, yet the poem rejects orthodox mourning: “I shall not murder... with any further / Elegy of innocence and youth.”
The poem invokes faith to negate it—a paradoxical rhetorical structure. Is mourning sacred or sacrilegious?
Ambiguity of agency and subject
Is the child “London’s daughter” or a symbol of human loss? The poet refuses a personal relationship, turning the child into a collective myth, yet calls her “deep with the first dead”—a line that oscillates between reverence and mythologizing abstraction.
4.2.3.Linguistic Stage — Unstable Meaning & Binary Reversal
1)The poem reverses privileged binaries:
Darkness vs. Light: “Fathering and all humbling darkness” becomes the source of life, whereas “light” implies the end (“the last light breaking”). Light, usually life-giving, signals extinction.
Mourning vs. Silence: Conventional elegy is refused. Silence, not expression, is chosen—yet the refusal is still written. This undoes itself—language denies the function it performs.
2) Religious binaries destabilized:
The child’s death is presented as both a sacred transformation and a non-event (“no other”). The poet uses sacred diction but denies ritual mourning, creating an unresolved tension between the spiritual and the nihilistic.
Thomas’s poem enacts what it denies: it refuses mourning by writing a beautiful elegy, mythologizing death even as it pretends to disown it. It is a text at war with itself, where language promises solemn restraint but performs aesthetic glorification.
References:-
“A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London by Dylan Thomas.” Famous Poems, Famous Poets. - All Poetry, allpoetry.com/A-Refusal-To-Mourn-The-Death,-By-Fire,-Of-A-Child-In-London . Accessed 6 July 2025.
Berry, Peter. Beginning Theory, 3/E. Viva Books Private Limited, 2010.
DoE-MKBU. “Deconstructive Reading of Sonnet 18 |.” YouTube, 12 July 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohY-w4cMhRM.
“In a Station of the Metro.” The Poetry Foundation, 29 Oct. 2024, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12675/in-a-station-of-the-metro . Accessed 6 July 2025.
“The Red Wheelbarrow.” The Poetry Foundation, 22 June 2024, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45502/the-red-wheelbarrow . Accessed 6 July 2025.
“Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” The Poetry Foundation, 16 Apr. 2025, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day . Accessed 6 July 2025.
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