Lab Activity Blog 1 Deconstruction
This blog is given by Baras sir.
Teacher's link :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohY-w4cMhRM
1)Sonnet 18: Shall I Love You Thee (Deconstruction)
Deconstruction of this Video:
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (abridged version)
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
...
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
The Primacy of the Signifier: Words (signifiers) never point to stable meanings (signifieds); meaning is always deferred (a concept Derrida calls différance).
Binary Oppositions: Literature often depends on oppositions (life/death, beauty/decay), which Derrida exposes as unstable and interdependent.
The Illusion of Presence: Writing is thought to "preserve" presence (the beloved, beauty, life), but it only constructs an illusion of presence
1. “Eternal Beauty” Is Always Deferred
Shakespeare claims the beloved’s beauty will live forever in verse:
“So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
But Derrida would argue that this “life” exists only in language—a system of signs—not in any real or fixed presence. The beloved’s beauty is not preserved, only deferred through text.
The poem does not present her; it re-presents her endlessly, and always inadequately.
New idea: The poem does not immortalize the beloved—it unmourns her in advance, delaying death’s sting through linguistic illusion. The sonnet becomes an act of deferred grief.
Binary Collapse: Life vs Death
Shakespeare contrasts:
Summer’s impermanence
Beloved’s eternal summer
Death’s brag vs Poetry’s immortality
But deconstruction reveals that:
“Eternal” only gains meaning through its contrast with the transient.
Death is always present in life (especially in poetry that attempts to resist it).
Thus, the claim “Nor shall Death brag…” ironically gives Death a role in the poem’s power, implying that the poem needs Death’s shadow to justify its beauty.
The Sonnet’s “Presence” Is an Absence
Shakespeare writes:
“When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st”
Here, the beloved “grows” into the poem—but that growth is abstract. We never see or know the beloved. She is not a presence, but a trace—an echo shaped by metaphor.
New idea: The sonnet is a mirror without a reflection—it promises eternal image, but offers only the structure of comparison, not the beloved herself.
New Interpretive Insight
Sonnet 18 pretends to stabilize beauty in language, but deconstruction reveals that beauty here is not eternal—it is linguistic, relational, and unstable. The poem’s power lies in delaying decay, not erasing it.
"Deferred Immortality" – a poetic trick where permanence is constructed by endlessly postponing loss through writing.
2) Description of Pg. 19,20,21
Ezra Pound’s delicate Imagist poem ‘On a Station in
the Metro’
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
1. Signifiers, not just things:
At first glance, you might think the poem is just describing people’s faces and comparing them to petals. But in deconstruction, we focus on how the words work as signifiers — not on the real things (faces, petals), but on the language and associations they carry.
So, instead of asking, “What are these faces like?” we ask, “What do the words 'faces', 'petals', and 'apparition' suggest through their sound, structure, and position in the poem?”
The word “apparition” means a ghost-like vision — something not fully real. So even before we see the petals, we feel a sense of mystery or ghostliness.
The faces in the crowd are not described as real people; they are ephemeral images, like ghostly petals appearing and disappearing.
The petals are soft, fragile, and beautiful — they carry emotional associations, not just a literal image.
So, the signifiers (the actual words) create a mood, not just a picture.
2. The role of poetic structure and sound:
Deconstruction also asks: how does the form of the poem change its meaning?
The two lines are separated, like a pause or silence between them.
The white space on the page highlights the comparison, making it more intense.
Words like “crowd” and “bough” have a soft rhyme; “petals” and “wet” share a sound pattern.
The rhythm shifts from light and flowing (first line) to heavy and final (second line), giving a strong, almost musical ending.
These sound patterns and layout are not just decoration. They create meaning that is not logical but emotional and sensory.
3. Kristeva’s ‘semiotic’ – meaning before meaning:
Julia Kristeva says poetry can touch us before we understand it. This is called the semiotic: sounds and rhythms that go deeper than meaning.
Think of how a baby makes musical sounds before learning words.
In this poem, the music of the words, their placement, and their echoes create a feeling — even before we interpret what the faces or petals actually mean.
So, the poem works not by making a rational argument, but by stirring something deeper — like the feeling of beauty, fragility, or sudden recognition in a crowd.
poem “The Red Wheelbarrow’ seems to assert the materiality
of the objects it names:
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
At first glance: a clear, calm farm scene
The poem seems very simple and direct.
It shows us a red wheelbarrow, rainwater, and white chickens.
These are real, material things.
The poem says “so much depends upon” them, so they must be important — maybe essential to everyday rural life.
There are no metaphors or comparisons — just objects.
So, it looks like the poem is trying to show the beauty of the real world — things we can see and touch.
Now look again: is it really so clear?
Let’s question what we just assumed — that this poem gives us “real” things.
1: These objects may not be real at all.
The red and white are very bright, with no mention of shadows, mud, or mess — which are common on real farms.
The wheelbarrow is "glazed" — a word we use for pottery or glass, or for something polished.
This makes the scene feel shiny and perfect, almost like a painting or a children’s book illustration, not something from daily life.
So maybe, the wheelbarrow is imaginary, not real. It's a symbol, or an image created by language, not a thing in the world.
2: Language controls what we see
The poem doesn’t describe actions or emotions, only still objects.
It breaks up words across lines ("wheel / barrow", "rain / water"), forcing us to read slowly and focus on sound and shape.
The poem’s structure draws attention to itself — not to the world, but to how it uses language to build images.
So, what we see depends not on the objects, but on the way language presents them.
3: "So much depends" on... what?
The poem starts with a big claim: "so much depends" — but it never explains what depends, or why.
Depends on what? The wheelbarrow? The image of the wheelbarrow? The feeling it gives?
The meaning is open, not fixed.
This makes the phrase unstable — it feels important, but we’re not sure how or why.
Final Deconstructive Insight:
Although the poem looks like it’s talking about solid, real things, it’s really making us aware of how language shapes our ideas of reality.
The wheelbarrow, the chickens, and the rainwater may be more imaginary than real.
The poem pretends to be simple, but it’s actually full of hidden complexity.
What we "see" depends not on the world, but on how the poem uses words and creates images in our minds.
Pg. 56,57,58
The three stages of the deconstructive process described here I have called the verbal, the textual, and the
linguistic. They are illustrated using Dylan Thomas's poem 'A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a
child in London' (Appendix 2).
1. The Verbal Stage: Contradictions in Individual Words or Phrases
This stage is similar to traditional close reading. The reader identifies paradoxes and contradictions in specific lines or words — especially where the literal meaning clashes with the implied meaning.
Example: The line “After the first death, there is no other” is contradictory. Calling something “first” suggests that there will be a “second,” “third,” and so on. But the poem says “there is no other.” This contradiction shows how language breaks down under its own logic.
Another example is the phrase involving “until” and “never,” which places mutually exclusive time concepts together, again highlighting the instability of meaning.
This stage reveals how language is not stable or reliable, but rather slippery and self-conflicting, which is central to the deconstructive approach.
2. The Textual Stage: Shifts in the Structure of the Poem
Here, the focus shifts from individual words to the overall form and progression of the text. The critic looks for shifts in tone, perspective, time, grammar, or voice, which reveal a lack of a unified or consistent viewpoint.
In Thomas’s poem, for instance:
The first two stanzas are cosmic and abstract, imagining geological time and the “end of the world.”
The third stanza suddenly shifts to the present, focusing on the child’s actual death.
The final stanza returns to a broader historical and symbolic view (e.g., “London’s daughter”), but now the imagery is ceremonial and even panegyrical (formal mourning), which contradicts the title’s claim of refusing to mourn.
This inconsistent movement between timeframes and emotional registers shows how the poem cannot fix a stable perspective — another symptom of the deeper instability of meaning.
3. The Linguistic Stage: Questioning Language Itself
This is the deepest and most philosophical level. It looks at how language fails to fully say what it wants to say. At this stage, the text seems aware of its own limitations, and yet it continues to use the very language it mistrusts.
Thomas’s speaker says he refuses to mourn, but writing the poem is itself an act of mourning.
He criticizes “grave truth” and traditional expressions of loss, calling them murderous to the real essence of the dead child — yet then uses elevated, ceremonial language (“London’s daughter,” “robed”) that resembles exactly what he claims to reject.
This is an example of what deconstruction calls performative contradiction — where the form and content are at odds. The poem wants to avoid the traps of language, but it falls into them anyway. Thomas, in this reading, is trapped by the medium of poetry itself.
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