Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 2015-2016.

Unit 1 Study
Guide

COMENTARIO DE TEXTOS
LITERARIOS EN LENGUA INGLESA
GRADO

UNIT 3 GUIDE | ANALYZING POETIC TEXTS

2022-2023
GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES:
LENGUA, LITERATURA Y CULTURA
Adriana Kiczkowski (co-ordinator)
Isabel Castelao
Inés Ordiz

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 CTLLI
STUDY GUIDE-UNIT 3
Analyzing Poetic Texts

Introduction

1. What is Poetry?
1.1. Elements of Poetry

2. Textual analysis: Dylan Thomas: “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a

Child in London” (poem).
2.1. Cultural and literary contextualization
2.1.1. Biographical information.
2.1.2. Historical context.
2.2. Analysis of poetic elements (structure, style, language, content).
➢ Self-Study activities/answers.

3. Literary Criticism:
3.1. “Post-structuralism and Deconstruction
➢ Self-Study activities/answers.
3.2. Critical authors: Fragment by Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology.
➢ Self-Study activities/answers.

4. References

5. Further resources

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INTRODUCTION

This unit is dedicated to the analysis of poetic texts. As an introduction to the subject,
we are going to read different definitions of the genre as well as the most important
structural elements to take into account when analyzing a poem.
Then, we will read and listen to "The Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of
a Child in London" by the Welsh writer Dylan Thomas and we will make a guided
analysis of the poem through a series of exercises and exploratory questions.
Finally, we will analyze the poem from a critical perspective such as "Post-
structuralism and Deconstruction". To do so, we will first read an introductory text on
these literary school of thoughts. You have a series of questions to guide you in
reading and understanding the text. We will also study the figure of Jacques Derrida,
French philosopher, considered one of the fathers of Deconstruction, and we will
read some fragments of one of his best-known works, Of Grammatology.
We know that this topic can be particularly complicated as it goes into a type
of analysis that requires prior knowledge of aspects of philosophy. But we are sure
that after a slow and careful reading you will be able to grasp the most important
concepts that will open up a new path of literary exploration.
In this unit you will find different audiovisual resources that will help you in your
study.
Don't forget to answer the Quiz at the end of the Study Guide, it will allow you
to see to what extent you have understood some of the key questions in this unit.

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1. WHAT IS POETRY?

Poetry is one of the oldest genres in literary history. Its earliest examples go back to ancient Greek
literature. In spite of this long tradition, it is harder to define than any other genre. Poetry is closely
related to the term “lyric,” which derives etymologically from the Greek musical instrument “lyra”
(“lyre” or “harp”) and points to an origin in the sphere of music. In classical antiquity as well as
in the Middle Ages, minstrels recited poetry, accompanied by the lyre or other musical instruments.
[…] Most traditional attempts to define poetry juxtapose poetry with prose. The majority of these
definitions are limited to characteristics such as verse, rhyme, and meter, which are traditionally
regarded as the classical elements that distinguish poetry from prose. These criteria, however,
cannot be applied to modern prose poetry or experimental poetry. Explanations of the genre which
combine poetic language with linguistic elements other than rhyme and meter do more justice to
non-traditional forms such as free verse or prose poems.
These approaches examine as lyric phenomena the choice of words as well as the use of
syntactic structures and rhetorical figures. Although these elements dominate in some forms of
poetry, they also appear in drama or fiction. In spite of the difficulties associated with the definition
of poetry, the above-mentioned heterogeneous criteria outline the major qualities that are
conventionally attributed to poetry. (Klarer, 28-29)

Poetry itself isn’t all one thing: Poems differ as much as the people who write and read them, or
as much as music and movies do. They can be by turns goofy, sad, or angry; they can tell a story,
comment on current events, or simply describe the look of a certain time of day. Deciding that
you “love,” “hate,” “get,” or “don’t get” all poetry based on your experience of one poem or of
one kind of poetry is a little like either deciding you love all music because Mozart moves you
or giving up on music entirely because Lady Gaga leaves you cold.
A good poem is not a secret message one needs a special decoder ring or an advanced degree
to decipher. Any thoughtful person who’s willing to try can make sense of it, though some poems
certainly do invite us to rethink our idea of what “making sense” might mean. Poetry has spoken
to millions of ordinary people across the centuries and around the world, so at least some poems
can speak to us, too, if we give both them and ourselves a chance. By the same token, even the
most devoted, experienced poetry lovers among us can become better, more responsive, more
thoughtful readers by simply reading more and different kinds of poetry and by exploring, the
various elements and techniques with which poetry is made.
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 People around the world have often turned to poetry to express their feelings and longings precisely
because poetry is, in certain vital ways, distinct from other forms of writing. Each genre plays by
its own rules and has its own history and traditions, so reading poetry effectively, like succeeding
in a video game, does involve learning and playing by certain rules. Any one poem may open itself
to multiple responses and interpretations, just as a game may allow you many ways of advancing
to the next level. But in both cases there are limits. Neither is a free- for- all in which “anything
goes.” (In both cases, too, some difficulty can be essential to the fun.) A poem wouldn’t mean
anything if it could mean everything.
Yet the questions we ask of a poem and the techniques we use to understand it are simply
variations of the same ones we use in reading fiction or drama. Indeed, some poems narrate action
just as a short story does; others work much like plays.
Finally, poems aren’t nearly as fragile as we take them to be when we worry about “over-
reading” or “analyzing them to death.” You can’t kill a poem. But a poem does experience a sort
of living death if it’s not read, re- read, and pondered over. Poems need you. Not only can they
bear the weight of your careful attention, but they also deserve it: the best of them are, after all,
the result of someone else’s. William Wordsworth may have done much to shape our contemporary
ideas about poetry when he famously described it as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings,” but his own poems were, like most great poems, the result of weeks, even years, of
writing and revision (Mays, 698-699).

1.1. Elements of Poetry

To introduce you to the elements of poetry, we have prepared these video classes:

Elements of Poetry I by Dr. Isabel Castelao

Elements of Poetry II by Dr. Isabel Castelao.

2. TEXTUAL ANALYSIS.

“A Refusal to Mourn the

Death, by Fire, of a Child in
London”

Dylan Thomas

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2.1 Cultural and Literary Contextualization

2.1.1. Biographical information

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953).

Dylan Marlais Thomas was born on October 27, 1914, in

Swansea, South Wales. His father was an English Literature
professor at the local grammar school and would often recite
Shakespeare, fortifying Thomas's love for the rhythmic
ballads of Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, and Edgar
Allan Poe.
Thomas dropped out of school at sixteen to become a junior
reporter for the South Wales Daily Post. By December of
1932, he left his job at the Post and decided to concentrate on
his poetry full-time. It was during this time, in his late teens,
that Thomas wrote more than half of his collected poems.
In 1934, when Thomas was twenty, he moved to London, won
the Poet's Corner book prize, and published his first book, 18
Poems (The Fortune press), to great acclaim. The book drew
from a collection of poetry notebooks that Thomas had written
years earlier, as would many of his most popular books.
Unlike his contemporaries, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden,
Thomas was not concerned with exhibiting themes of social
and intellectual issues, and his writing, with its intense
lyricism and highly charged emotion, had more in common with the Romantic tradition.
Thomas describes his technique in a letter: "I make one image—though 'make' is not the right
word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual &
critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third
image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my
imposed formal limits, conflict."
Two years after the publication of 18 Poems, Thomas met the dancer Caitlin Macnamara at a
pub in London. At the time, she was the mistress of painter Augustus John. Macnamara and
Thomas engaged in an affair and married in 1937.
About Thomas's work, Michael Schmidt writes: "There is a kind of authority to the word
magic of the early poems; in the famous and popular later poems, the magic is all show. If they
have a secret it is the one we all share, partly erotic, partly elegiac. The later poems arise out of
personality."
In 1940, Thomas and his wife moved to London. He had served as an anti-aircraft gunner but
was rejected for more active combat due to illness. To avoid the air raids, the couple left London
in 1944. They eventually settled at Laugharne, in the Boat House where Thomas would write many
of his later poems.
Thomas recorded radio shows and worked as a scriptwriter for the BBC. Between 1945 and
1949, he wrote, narrated, or assisted with over a hundred radio broadcasts. In one show, "Quite
Early One Morning," he experimented with the characters and ideas that would later appear in his
poetic radio play Under Milk Wood (1953).
In 1947 Thomas was awarded a Traveling Scholarship from the Society of Authors. He took
his family to Italy, and while in Florence, he wrote In Country Sleep, And Other Poems (Dent,
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 1952), which includes his most famous poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night." When they
returned to Oxfordshire, Thomas began work on three film scripts for Gainsborough Films. The
company soon went bankrupt, but Thomas's scripts, "Me and My Bike," "Rebecca's Daughters,"
and "The Beach at Falesa," were made into films. They were later collected in Dylan Thomas: The
Filmscripts (JM Dent & Sons, 1995).
In January 1950, at the age of thirty-five, Thomas visited America for the first time. His
reading tours of the United States, which did much to popularize the poetry reading as a new
medium for the art, are famous and notorious. Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the
popular American imagination—he was theatrical, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read
his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling.
Thomas toured America four times, with his last public engagement taking place at the City
College of New York. A few days later, he collapsed in the Chelsea Hotel after a long drinking
bout at the White Horse Tavern. On November 9, 1953, he died at St. Vincent's Hospital in New
York City at the age of thirty-nine. He had become a legendary figure, both for his work and the
boisterousness of his life. He was buried in Laugharne, and almost thirty years later, a plaque to
Dylan was unveiled in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey.
Source: poets.org

2.1.2. Historical context

The poem was published in the summer of 1945 just after the end of World War
II – Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) came on 8 May 1945. The poem recalls the
air raids against London perpetrated by the Nazis known as The Blitz (1940-
1941) and the The Baby Blitz (1944).

The Blitz, (September 7, 1940–May 11, 1941), intense bombing campaign undertaken by Nazi
Germany against the United Kingdom during World War II. For eight months the Luftwaffe
dropped bombs on London and other strategic cities across Britain. The attacks were
authorized by Germany’s chancellor, Adolf Hitler, after the British carried out a nighttime air
raid on Berlin. The offensive came to be called the Blitz after the German word blitzkrieg
(“lightning war”). Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “The Blitz”. Encyclopedia
Britannica, the Blitz | Facts, History, Damage, & Casualties | Britannica. Accessed 22
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 September 2022.

The Baby Blitz. Operation Steinbock was a late war German operation carried out by the Luftwaffe
between January and May 1944 against targets in southern England, mainly in and around the
London area during the night. In Britain it is known as "the Baby Blitz", due to the much smaller
scale of operations compared to the Luftwaffe's strategic bombing of the British Isles in 1940-41.
https://worldhistoryproject.org/1944/1/21/first-attack-of-operation-steinbock-or-baby-blitz

2.2 Analysis of poetic elements (structure, style, language)

In 1952, Dylan Thomas published his Collected Poems. 1934-1952. In the

“Author’s Note” he declared: “This book contains most of the poems I have
written, and all, up to the present year, that I wish to preserve” – “A refusal to
Mourn” is one of them.

While the ideas expressed in this poem are not difficult, the form in which they
are expressed is challenging. Read the poem once through without looking up
any words – this is just to give you a first impression. (Suggestion: don’t forget
to read the title as well).

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

1 Never until the mankind making

2 Bird beast and flower
3 Fathering and all humbling darkness
4 Tells with silence the last light breaking
5 And the still hour
6 Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

7 And I must enter again the round

8 Zion of the water bead
9 And the synagogue of the ear of corn
10 Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
11 Or sow my salt seed
12 In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

13 The majesty and burning of the child’s death.

14 I shall not murder
15 The mankind of her going with a grave truth
16 Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
17 With any further
18 Elegy of innocence and youth.

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 19 Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
20 Robed in the long friends,
21 The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
22 Secret by the unmourning water
23 Of the riding Thames.
24 After the first death, there is no other.

Source: poets.org

Now, with the text in front of you, listen to Dylan Thomas reciting his poem. Pay
attention to where Thomas makes pauses and to his intonation: Where does his
voice go up? Where does it drop? What words or phrases does he stress?

The acoustic dimension of a poem helps us make sense of it. READ and
LISTEN to Thomas’s poem as many times as you need, looking up words
where necessary. This will give you a firmer overall understanding of the poem.

A Refusal to Mourn… Dylan Thomas – YouTube

Now let’s analyze the poem. The Sef-Study activities are exploratory questions that
will guide you through the most important aspects to consider reading a poem. In
the following section you will find answers and comments, however, we recommend
that you try to do it on your own first.

Self-Study activities

Here are some questions or exercises to guide your analysis of the poem. Try
them out for yourself and then consult the answers below.

1. Write a short summary in prose of what you think this poem is about. Don’t worry if
there are details or aspects you can’t quite grasp yet.
2. You will no doubt have noticed the poem’s complex syntax. You may even have felt
frustrated by it! Look at the first three stanzas (look up the meaning of “stanza”). Do
you notice anything strange about the punctuation? Where and what is the first
punctuation mark? What happens to Thomas’s voice when he reaches this point?
3. Transcribe the first three stanzas as a prose paragraph, in order to make it easier to
understand? (Can you identify the subject and main verb?) (Suggestion: look for
subordinate clauses. Example: “and the still hour is come of the sea tumbling in
harness”).
4. How do you react as a reader to the way in which this ‘sentence’ is constructed and
punctuated? How is your comprehension affected?
5. Using a good monolingual English dictionary, look up the following words and
provide synonyms or explanations in English. (Suggestion: take into account the
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 part of speech the word belongs to, i.e., whether the word is a noun, an adjective,
gerund, etc.):
mourn (title)

fathering line 3

humbling l. 3
still l. 5
tumbling l. 6
harness l. 6
sackcloth l. 12
grave l. 15
elegy l. 18
robed l. 20

6. What do you think the poem’s speaker (also called “the poetic voice”) means when
he uses the metaphors indicated below? (Go back to “Elements of Poetry I” video to
understand the rhetorical figure of Metaphor. Here is a definition: it is “a comparison
or an analogy [implying] that one object is another one, figuratively speaking”; for
example, “All the world’s a stage”, from Shakespeare’s As You Like It).
“my salt seed (line 11)

“valley of sackcloth” (l. 12)

“a grave truth“ (l.15)

7. What is the effect of using so many present participles (fathering, humbling,

tumbling, etc.)?
8. Identify other poetic devices (techniques). That is, the poetic use of language
(that makes it stand out from the usual use), it includes rhetorical figures
(figurative language) but not only.

9. In questions 2, 3, 4 and 5, you’ve had the chance to consider Thomas’s text

both as a poem and a piece of prose. What formal differences are there, in other
words, what specifically makes this text a poem and not a piece of prose?
(Suggestion: this question is also related to the previous one. Don’t be afraid to
state the obvious, i.e. “it’s written in verses or stanzas” or “it repeats certain
words or structures”).

10. Try to identify the rhyme looking at the sound at the line-end. How would you
interpret this pattern of sound in the poem in relation to the whole “message” or
meaning of the poem to which we arrive by interpreting it as readers? In this
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 case, you will try to fuse form and content in the poems, their relation, and how
one cannot go without the other in a poem. (This question is connected to the
following one).
11. Is the meaning of the poem affected by the form in which it is expressed? Would
the meaning be altered if Thomas had chosen to express it, say, through an
essay or a letter to the editor of a newspaper?

Answers:

1. In the poem, the speaker says he is not going to lament the death of a child in a London
fire – and then does precisely that. His lament draws on Christian, Jewish and pagan
traditions, i.e. Biblical references. However, this poetic "I" conceives human life from an
atheist or at least clearly non-religious point of view that denies the survival of individual
consciousness after death and contemplates death as the mere natural process of
decomposition and the body's components returning to the eternal cycle of the elements
in nature, that will nurture new life until the end of the universe.

2.The first punctuation mark comes at the end of line thirteen. There is nothing before
that. His voice drops as it is the end of a complete sentence.

3.Listening carefully to Thomas’s reading, try to write the poem as a text undivided in
lines or stanzas, as if it were prose (remember that you must discuss the text in its original
form, spelling, and punctuation and pay attention to the unorthodox use of language that
poets may resort to). Different interpretations regarding syntax will translate in different
punctuation and meaning. One version could be this:
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.

4. You may find this opening lines extremely difficult due to the syntax and punctuation,
which are non-standard. The main verbs "let pray […] or sow" (modified by the
grammatical structure of inversion “Shall I” ) come almost at the very end of the
sequence. You may need to read these lines several times before you can begin to
understand them; this puzzlement and search for meaning is, doubtlessly, the objective
of the author. Even though the title helps, all in all, understanding is frustrated and
delayed by the poem’s complex and unusual syntax and punctuation. Actually, the lack
of the usual, standard punctuation and the intentional breaking of the first sentence into
three stanzas have a function. Language calls the reader's attention to itself. The reader
is to notice this and realize and overcome such apparent problem. The language of the
poem challenges the expectations and assumptions of the average British reader of the
1940s both in form and content.

In Understanding Poetry (1976), poets Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren suggest
their own prose paraphrase of the opening sentence:

Never until the darkness that begets and humbles all tells me that hour of my own death, will I
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 utter any prayer or weep any tear to mourn the majesty of this child’s death. (Note: the verb “to
beget” is a Biblical which means ‘to engender, to create, to give life’).

5. mourn – infinitive (‘to mourn’); grieve, lament, express sorrow.

fathering – present participle of verb ‘to father’, it functions like an adjective: engendering,
creating.

humbling – present participle of verb ‘to humble’ functions like an adjective: debasing,
humiliating.

still – adjective; tranquil, calm, silent, hushed (it is not an adverb of time in this context).

tumbling – gerund of the verb ‘to tumble’: falling, tottering; it indicates how the "still hour
/ Is come out of the sea".

harness – noun; equipment used to control or restrain a horse, or a person.

sackcloth – noun; rough fabric, mentioned in the Bible as a sign of mourning together
with casting ashes on the mourner's head and gnashing of teeth.

grave – adjective; serious, important, solemn, somber, but also suggesting grave as a
noun, meaning place for burial of a corpse, modifying "truth".

elegy – noun; a song or poem of lament (especially for someone who has died).

robed – past participle of verb ‘to robe’ functioning as an adjective: clothed, clad, covered.

6. “my salt seed”-- combines the two processes or events central to the poem: death
(and mourning) and rebirth (and engendering). ‘Salt’ connotes tears shed in grief (tears
taste like salt), ‘seed’ suggests the creation of life and also the voice's (even the poet's)
poem as creation as 'seed' in the reader's consciousness that may 'bear the fruit' of
making the reader think , reflect on life, death, her/his own personal beliefs, etc.

“valley of sackcloth”-- suggests the ‘valley of tears’ (or life) one leaves when one dies
and the cloth or garment worn by mourners or penitents.

“a grave truth”-- takes an adjective, "grave", usually associated with certain collocations
(‘a grave responsibility’, ‘a grave mistake’) and transforms its meaning in a literary way.
A word like “grave” inevitably evokes a tomb, burial, coffin – all related to death—but in
the context of this poem, "grave truth" is used ironically: it suggests that epitaphs and
panegyrics, the good things that are engraved on stone or said in funerals to praise the
dead person and to appease the mind of the witnesses, are not true. This is also
connected with the idea that he will not "murder the mankind of her going”, i.e. he will not
hide the fact that she died because of mankind, in war (significantly, Dylan Thomas does
not use the word 'humanity' for that would change the whole meaning into a “humane”
death, which is more or less the opposite what the verse wants to say).

7. Poetry is a particular form of language tending, among other things, to repeat patterns
of sound, phrases, and words.
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 Some sounds are repeated at the beginning of words. This repetition is
connected with the meaning of the verse by the effect that the basic sound has in
connection with feelings, natural phenomena, etc.
The repetition of nasal sounds in the first lines emphasises the solemnity of
the occasion and also suggests the moans of mourning (it is no chance that these words
begin with /m/, they relate and reproduce the basic human emotions and their
physiological manifestation).
Also, the repetitive “-ing suffix” in this poem is just another example of this.
One of the effects of threading -ing words throughout the poem (there are nine in 24
lines) is to give it internal cohesion. Another effect is to create a sense of unbroken
movement and continuity, of unending process. This would in turn support the theme of
the eternal life-death cycle.

8. Here are some thoughts:

➢ the visual structure or appearance of the text on the page: it looks like a poem, it
is arranged in stanzas, line-breaks, etc. This form arrangement of the words, then,
are traditionally associated to the genre of poetry. In this sense it there is no formal
innovation. A prose paragraph or chapters in a novel would look entirely different.

➢ repetition of sounds or alliteration (initial sounds of words, -ing endings), themes

(life and death).

➢ the regular stanzaic form: four stanzas of six lines each.

➢ the rhyme scheme is (more or less) a regular abcabc;

➢ the metre (=métrica) or rhythm is not that of ordinary spoken language, but it is
related with traditional English rhythms, thus the long verses have four beats or
stressed syllables while the shorter verses (the second and fifth lines in each
stanza) have three. The traditional rhythm in Old English poetry and ballads from
the Middle Ages to the 19th-century as well as many songs in 20th-century pop-
music is the “four-beat” verse. Four-beat verse is characterized by an
indeterminate number of syllables per line where four of them are stressed, they
are the beats of the verse, and the rest are unstressed.

➢ there is enjambement (the syntactical continuation of the verse into the next one
or following verses in order to form a sentence; be aware that lines are not to be
considered in isolation having a complete meaning of their own, but only taking
into account the continuation into the other line, only then, meaning could be
interpreted).

➢ the syntax is profoundly non-standard: no-one speaks or writes or communicates

like that in normal circumstances. As indicated above, this is language drawing
attention to itself (this is a main characteristic of poetic language that could be
called “metalinguistic”). It’s saying: ‘look at me, I’m different, pay attention to me,
think about my particular form and interpret me’. Language in poetry (and in most
literary use of language) is not “transparent”, as something we could ignore as we
are just interested in “meaning” (the message), as we generally do in the
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 everyday. It is not a “transparent” vehicle of communication but “communicates”
itself, it stands on its own and becomes non-transparent through textures and
particular sensorial qualities, provoking reaction by itself.

➢ the poem is rich in metaphors, some easy to grasp, some others not.

➢ the poem is also rich in paradoxes and contradictions (the speaker or poetic voice
‘refuses’ to mourn, and then spends 24 lines doing just that!).

9. As noted in the first point of the above question, a poem has nearly always a different
shape from that of a piece of prose. It does not have paragraphs, it has (or tends to have)
stanzas; the line endings are very important (these will contain the end rhyme) and the
words placed here will carry greater emphasis than others. The rest of the points also
identify “A refusal to mourn…” as a poem rather than prose. (Watch the two “Elements
of Poetry I and II” videos to review the “visual” and “aural” particularities of poetry)

10.“Extraordinary too is the stanzaic form of “A Refusal to Mourn […]”: four rhyming
stanzas: “abcabc”; that is, eight identical “abc” triples, each of them consisting of a long
line, a short line, and a long line. In this metre, it seems to me at least, Thomas imitates
“the sea tumbling in harness,” “the unmourning water,” and “the riding Thames.” These
three-line “abc” units are two waves and a trough – the crest of a wave, its trough or
valley, and then another crest. The poem moves like the sea in its round (Earth-like)
“bead,” rising and falling with the tides, every day the same, every month the same, as
the cycle of life”. The music of “Refusal to Mourn” moves reflecting the heart-felt
consolation Dylan Thomas speaks about. Death is to life what a trough is to the crest of
every wave in the tumbling sea”.

11. Again we come back to the question of form. In poetry the meaning (the content of
the poem) and the way we receive the text are directly impacted by the form in which
they are delivered (the choices of the author). The singularity or peculiarity of the shape
Dylan Thomas gives to his meditation on the death of a child, the way he deliberately
uses language, intensifies, modulates and manipulates its meaning in ways in which
simply declaring the sentence, “a child has burnt to death”, would not.

3. LITERARY CRITICISM

Once we have analyzed some stylistic issues of the poem, we are going to read some
critical theories to see how to interpret the text from other perspectives with the help of
interpretative tools such as concepts, theories, ideas from main thinkers that have
influenced literary studies and the way we understand literature. In this particular case,
we are going to go hand in hand with Post-structuralism, an extremely important
current of critical thought that changed the way we approached the meaning and
interpretation of literature in the second half of the twentieth century.

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3.1. Post-structuralism and Deconstruction

To study the most important concepts of Post-structuralism and Deconstruction we have

selected a text by Charles E. Bressler in his book Literary Criticism. An Introduction to
Theory and Practice. As we said in the introduction to this Unit, this topic is complex since
it requires the command of a series of concepts from the fields of linguistics and
philosophy. But we are sure that after a careful reading of the text you will be able to
understand the most important ideas of this stream of thought that has been so important
for the development of other schools of literary criticism in the last decades of the
twentieth century.

Emerging in the late 1960s as a new strategy for textual analysis and an alternative approach to interpreting
literature, poststructuralism captured the attention of (…) critical theorists. Like structuralism, its
immediate predecessor, this new movement is best characterized as an activity or reading strategy, not a
philosophy. Unlike other schools of criticism, poststructuralism possesses neither an accepted body of
doctrines nor methodologies. Rather than providing answers about the meaning of texts, this critical
activity asks questions, endeavoring to show that what a text claims it says and what it actually says are
discernibly different. By casting doubt on most previously held theories, poststructuralism declares that a
text has an infinite number of possible interpretations. And the interpretations themselves, the
poststructuralists posit, are just as creative and important as the text being interpreted.
Although the term poststructuralism presently refers to a variety of theories (New Historicism, for
example) that have developed after structuralism, today the terms poststructuralism and deconstruction are
often used interchangeably. Coined by its founding father, Jacques Derrida, deconstruction first emerged
on the American literary stage in 1966 when Derrida, a French philosopher and teacher, read his paper
"Structure, Sign, and Play" at a Johns Hopkins University symposium. (…) Derrida inaugurated what many
critics believe to be the most intricate and challenging method of textual analysis yet to appear. (…) Unlike
a unified treatise, Derrida claims, his approach to reading (and literary analysis) is more a "strategic device"
than a methodology, more a strategy or approach to literature than a school or theory of criticism. Such
theories of criticism, he believes, must identify with a body of knowledge that they decree to be true or to
contain truth. (…)
In order to understand deconstruction and its "strategic" approach to a text, then, we must first gain a
working knowledge of the historical and philosophical roots of structuralism, a linguistic approach to
textual analysis that gained critical attention and popularity in the 1950s and 1960s (…) From this school
of criticism Derrida borrows the basis of and the starting point for his deconstructive strategy.

Historical Development

Derrida begins formulating his "strategy of reading" by critiquing Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in
General Linguistics. Saussure, the father of modern linguistics, dramatically shifted the focus of linguistic
science in the early part of the twentieth century. It is his ideas concerning language that form the core of
structuralism, the critical body of literary theory from which Derrida borrows one of the major
philosophical building blocks of deconstruction.
According to Saussure, structural linguistics (and structuralism itself) rests on a few basic principles.
First, language is a system of rules, and these rules govern its every aspect, including individual sounds
that comprise a word (the t in cat, for example), small units that join together to form a word (garden + er
= gardener), grammatical relationships between words (such as the rule that a singular subject must
combine with a singular verb—for example, in John eats ice cream), and the relationships among all words
in a sentence (such as the relationship between the phrase under a tree and all remaining words in the
sentence Mary sits under a tree to eat her lunch). Every speaker of a language both consciously and
unconsciously learns these rules and knows when they are broken. Speakers of English know, for example,
that the sentence Simon grew up to be a brilliant doctor seems correct or follows the rules of the English
language but that the sentence Simon up grew a brilliant doctor is somehow incorrect or violates the rules
of English. These rules that comprise a language Saussure dubs langue. Saussure recognizes that individual
speakers of a language evidence langue in their individual speech utterances, which he calls parole. It is

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the task of the linguist, Saussure believes, to infer a language's langue from the analysis of many instances
of parole.
(…) Before Saussure, linguists believed that the structure of language was mimetic, merely mimicking
the outside world; language, then, had no structure of its own. It simply copied its Structure from the reality
exhibited in the world in which it was utilized. Saussure denies that language is intrinsically mimetic and
demonstrates that it is primarily determined by its own internal rules, such as phonology (individual
sounds), grammar (the principles and rules of a language), and syntax (how words combine within an
utterance to form meaning). Furthermore, these rules are highly systematized and structured. (…) But most
importantly, Saussure argues that the linguistic sign (the sounds of words and their representations in a
language) that comprises language itself is both arbitrary and conventional. For example, most languages
have different words for the same concept. For instance, the English word man is homme in French. And
in English we know that the meaning or function of the word pit exists not because it possesses some innate
acoustic quality but because it differs from hit, wit, and lit. In other words, the linguistic sign is composed
of two parts: the signifier, or the spoken or written constituent such as the sound /t/ and the orthographic
(written) symbol t, and the signified, the concept that is signaled by the signifier. It is this relationship
between the signifier (the word dog, for example) and the signified (the concept or the reality behind the
word dog) that Saussure maintains is arbitrary and conventional. The linguistic sign, then, is defined by
differences that distinguish it from other signs, not by any innate properties.
Believing that our knowledge of the world is shaped by the language that represents it, Saussure insists
upon the arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified. By so doing, he undermines the
long-held belief that there is some natural link between the word and the thing it represents. For Saussure,
meaning in language, then, resides in a systematized combination of sounds that chiefly rely on the
differences among these signs, not any innate properties within the signs themselves. It is this concept that
meaning in language is determined by the differences among the language signs that Derrida borrows from
Saussure as a key building block in the formulation of deconstruction.
Derridean deconstruction begins with and emphatically affirms Saussure's decree that language is
a system based on differences. Derrida agrees with Saussure that we can know the meaning of
signifiers through and because of their relationships and their differences among themselves. Unlike
Saussure, Derrida also applies this reasoning to the signified. Like the signifier, the signified (or
concept) can also be known only through its relationships and its differences from other signifieds.
Furthermore, declares Derrida, the signified cannot orient or make permanent the meaning of the
signifier, for the relationship between the signifier and the signified is both arbitrary and
conventional. And, accordingly, signifieds often function as signifiers. For example, in the sentence I
filled the glass with milk, the spoken or written word glass is a signifier; its signified is the concept of a
container that can be filled. But in the sentence The container was filled with glass, the spoken or written
word container, a signified in the previous sentence, is now a signifier, its signified being the concept of
an object that can be filled.

Assumptions

Believing that signification (how we arrive at meaning from the linguistic signs in language) is both
arbitrary and conventional, Derrida now begins his process of turning Western philosophy on its head: he
bodly asserts that the entire history of Western metaphysics from Plato to the present is founded upon a
classic, fundamental error: the searching for a transcendental signified, an external point of reference
upon which one may build a concept or philosophy. Once found, this transcendental signified would
provide ultimate meaning, being the origin of origins, reflecting itself, and as Derrida says, providing a
“reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign.” (…) For example, if we posit that I or self is a
transcendental signified, then the concept of self becomes the unifying principle upon which I structure my
world. Objects, concepts, ideas or even people only take on meaning in my world if I filter them through
my unifying, ultimate signified: self.
Unlike other signifieds, the transcendental signified would have to be understood without comparing
it to other signifieds or signifiers. In other words, its meaning would originate directly with itself, not
differentially or relationally as does the meaning of all other signifieds or signifiers. These transcendental
signifieds would then provide the “center” of meaning, allowing those who believed in them to structure
their ideas or reality around these “centers” of truth. (…)
According to Derrida, Western metaphysics has invented a variety of terms that function as centers:
God, reason, origin, being, essence, truth, humanity, beginning, end, and self, to name a few. Each operates
as a concept or term that is self-sufficient and self-originating and serves as a transcendental signified.
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This Western proclivity for desiring a center Derrida names logocentrism: the belief that there is an
ultimate reality or center of truth that can serve as the basis for all our thoughts and actions.
That we can never totally free ourselves from our logocentric habit of thinking and our inherited
concept of the universe Derrida readily admits. To “decenter” any transcendental signified is to be caught
up automatically in the terminology that allows that centering concept to operate. For example, if the
concept seif functions as my center and I then "discover" my unconscious self, I automatically place in
motion a binary operation or two opposing concepts: the self and the unconscious self. By decentering and
questioning the self, I may cause the unconscious seif to become the new center. By questioning the old
center, I may establish a new one.
Since the establishing of one center of unity automatically means that another is decentered,
Derrida concludes that Western metaphysics is based on a system of binary operations or conceptual
oppositions. For each center, there exist an opposing center (God/humankind, for example). In
addition, Western philosophy decrees that in each of these binary operations or two opposing centers,
one concept is superior and defines itself by its opposite or inferior center. We know truth, for
instance, because we know deception; we know good because we know bad. It is the creating of these
hierarchal binaries as the basis for Western metaphysics to which Derrida objects. (…) In the binary
oppositions (…) Derrida declares that one element will always be in a superior position, or
privileged, while the other becomes inferior, or unprivileged. According to this way of thinking, the
first or top elements in the following list of binary oppositions are privileged, for example:
man/woman, human/animal, soul/body, good/bad (…).

Methodology

The first stage in a deconstructive reading is to recognize the existence and the operation of binary
oppositions in our thinking. (…) Once (…) any hierarchy is recognized and acknowledged, Derrida
asserts, we can readily reverse its elements. Such a reversal is possible since truth is ever-elusive,
for we can always decenter the center if any is found. By reversing the hierarchy, Derrida does not
wish merely to substitute one hierarchy for another and to involve himself in a negative mode. When
the hierarchy is reversed, says Derrida, we can examine those values and beliefs that give rise to
both the original hierarchy and the newly created one. Such examination will reveal how the
meaning of terms arises from the differences between them (…).
The relationship between any binary hierarchy, however, is always unstable and problematic. It
is not Derrida’s purpose simply to reverse all binary oppositions that exist in Western thought but
rather to show the fragile basis for the establishment of such hierarchies and the possibility of
inverting these hierarchies to gain new insights into language and life. (…) In the truth/deception
hierarchy, for example, Western thought would assert the supremacy of truth over deception,
attributing to deception a mere supplementary role. Such a logocentric way of thinking asserts the
purity of truth over deception. (…) By inverting the privileged and unprivileged elements, Derrida
begins to develop his reading strategy of deconstruction. (…) He asserts his answer to logocentrism
and other Western elements by coining a new word and concept: difference. The word itself is
derived from the French word différer, meaning (1) to defer, postpone, or delay, and (2) to differ, to
be different from. Derrida deliberately coins his word to be ambiguous, taking on both meanings
simultaneously
JJ (…).
Understanding what Derrida means by différance is one of the primary keys to understanding
deconstruction. Basically, différence is Derrida's “What if” question. What if no transcendental
signified exists? What if there is no presence in which we can find ultimate truth? What if all our
knowledge does not arise from self-identity? What if there is no essence, being, or inherently unifying
element in the universe? What then?
When such a reversal of Western metaphysics’ pivotal binary operation occurs, two dramatic
results follow. First: All human knowledge becomes referential; that is, we can only know something
because it differs from some other bit of knowledge, not because we can compare this knowledge to
any absolute or coherent unity (a transcendental signified). Human knowledge, then, must now be
based on difference. We know something because it differs from something else to which it is related.
Nothing can now be studied or learned in isolation, for all knowledge becomes context-related.
Second: We must also forgo closure; that is, since no transcendental signified exists, all
interpretations concerning life, self-identity, and knowledge are possible, probable, and legitimate.
But what is the significance of différance when reading texts? If we, like Derrida, assert that
différance operates in language and therefore also in writing (…), what are the implications for textual
17
analysis? The most obvious answer is that texts lack presence. Once we do away with the
transcendental signified and reverse the presence/absence binary operation, texts can no longer have
presence; that is, in isolation, texts cannot possess meaning. Since all meaning and knowledge is now
based on differences, no text can simply mean one thing. Texts become intertextual. Meaning evolves
from the interrelatedness of one text to many other texts. Like language itself, texts are caught in a
dynamic, context-related interchange. Never can we state a text’s definitive meaning, for it has none.
No longer can we declare one interpretation to be right and another wrong, for meaning in a text is always
elusive, always dynamic, always transitory.
The search, then, for the text’s correct meaning or the author’s so-called intentions becomes
meaningless. Since meaning is derived from differences in a dynamic, context-related, ongoing
process, all texts have multiple meanings or interpretations. If we assert, as does Derrida, that no
transcendental signified exists, then there can exist no absolute or pure meaning supposedly conveyed
by authorial intent or professorial dictates. Meaning evolves as we, the readers, interact with the text,
with both the readers and the text providing social and cultural context.
A deconstructor would thus begin textual analysis assuming that a text has multiple interpretations
and that it allows itself to be reread and thus reinterpreted countless times. Since no one correct
interpretation of a text exists, the joy of textual analysis resides in discovering new interpretations
each time a text is read or reread. (…)
When beginning the interpretative process, deconstructors seek to overrule their own logocentric
and inherited ways of viewing a text. Such revolutionary thinking decrees that they find the binary
oppositions at work in the text itself. These binary oppositions, they believe, represent established
and accepted ideologies that more frequently than not posit the existence of transcendental signifieds.
These binary operations, then, restrict meaning, for they already assume a fixed interpretation of truth
and falsehood, reason and insanity, good and bad. Realizing that these hierarchies presuppose a fixed
and biased way of viewing the world, deconstructors seek out the binary oppositions operating in the
text and reverse them. (…) By reversing the hierarchies upon which we base our interpretations,
deconstructors wish to free us from the constraints of our prejudiced beliefs. Such freedom, they
hope, will allow us to see a text from exciting new perspectives or levels that we have never before
recognized (…).
Deconstructors do not wish to set up a new philosophy, a new literary theory of analysis, or a new
school of literary criticism. Instead, they present a reading strategy that allows us to make choices
concerning the various levels of interpretation we see operating in a text. All levels, they maintain,
have validity. They furthermore believe that their approach to reading frees them and us from
ideological allegiances that restrict our finding meaning in a text (…). What an author thinks he or
she says or means in a text may be quite different from what is actually written. Deconstructors
therefore look for places in the text where the author loses control of language and says what was
supposedly not meant to be said. These “slips of language” often occur in questions, figurative
language, and strong declarations. By examining these slips and the binary operations that govern
them, deconstructurs show the undecidability of a text’s meaning.
(…) Deconstruction aims at an ongoing relationship between the interpreter (the critic) and the
text. By examining the text alone, deconstructors hope to ask a set of questions that continually
challenges the ideological positions of power and authority that dominate literary criticism. And in
the process of discovering meaning in a text, they declare that the criticism itself is just as valuable
as the creative writing that is being read, thus inverting the creative writing/criticism hierarchy.
(Bressler, 71-82).

Poetry and Deconstruction: an example

To see a practical example of the aspects that we must consider when analyzing a literary
text from a deconstructivist perspective, let's read the following text that belongs to the
book Beginning Theory by Peter Barry (2009). Barry deals precisely with the poem by
Dylan Thomas that we are working on in this Unit “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire,
of a Child in London”.

I try here to give a clear example of deconstructive practice, showing what is distinctive about it while at
the same time suggesting that it may not constitute a complete break with more familiar forms of criticism.
The three stages of the deconstructive process described here I have called the verbal, the textual, and
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the linguistic. They are illustrated using Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire,
of a Child in London.
The verbal stage is very similar to that of more conventional forms of close reading, as pioneered in
the 1920s and 1930s in Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, and elsewhere. It involves looking in the text
for paradoxes and contradictions, at what might be called the purely verbal level. For instance, the final
line of Thomas’s poem reads ‘After the first death there is no other’. This statement contradicts and refutes
itself: if something is called the first then a sequence is implied of second, third, fourth, and so on. So, the
phrase ‘the first death’ clearly implies, at the literal level, that there will be others. Internal contradictions
of this kind are indicative, for the deconstructionist, of language’s endemic unreliability and slipperiness,
of which more will be said later. There are other examples of this kind in the poem. Please look again at
the poem and see if you can identify others. You might begin by considering the use of the word ‘until’ in
combination with ‘never’ in the opening line.
One other facet of post-structuralism relevant here is its tendency to reverse the polarity of common
binary oppositions like male and female, day and night, light and dark, and so on, so that the second term,
rather than the first, is ’privileged’ and regarded as the more desirable. Thus, in the poem it seems to be
darkness, rather than light, which is seen as engendering life, as the poet talks of ’the mankind making /
Bird beast and flower / Fathering and all humbling darkness’. This paradox reflects the way the world of
this poem is simultaneously a recognisable version of the world we live in, and an inversion of that world.
For the deconstructionist, again, such moments are symptomatic of the way language doesn’t reflect or
convey our world but constitutes a world of its own, a kind of parallel universe or virtual reality. Identifying
contradictory or paradoxical phrases like these, then, is the first step in going against the grain of the poem,
reading it ’against itself, showing the ’signifiers’ at war with the ‘signified’, and revealing its repressed
unconscious. This first stage will always turn up useful material for use in the later stages.
The ‘textual’ stage of the method moves beyond individual phrases and takes a more overall view of
the poem. At this second stage the critic is looking for shifts or breaks in the continuity of the poem: these
shifts reveal instabilities of attitude, and hence the lack of a fixed and unified position. They can be of
various kinds (as listed in the diagram given earlier); they may be shifts in focus, shifts in time, or tone, or
point of view, or attitude, or pace, or vocabulary. They may well be indicated in the grammar, for instance,
in a shift from first person to third, or past tense to present. Thus, they show paradox and contradiction on
a larger scale than is the case with the first stage, taking a broad view of the text as a whole. In the case of
‘A Refusal to Mourn’, for instance, there are major time shifts and changes in viewpoint, not a smooth
chronological progression. Thus, the first two stanzas imagine the passing of geological aeons and the
coming of the ‘end of the world’ — the last light breaks, the sea finally becomes still, the cycle which
produces ‘Bird beast and flower’ comes to an end as ‘all humbling darkness’ descends. But the third stanza
is centred on the present — the actual death of the child, ‘The majesty and burning of the child’s death’.
The final stanza takes a broad vista like the first two, but it seems to centre on the historical progression of
the recorded history of London, as witnessed by ‘the unmourning water / Of the riding Thames’. Hence,
no single wider context is provided to ’frame’ and contextualise the death of the child in a defined
perspective, and the shifts in Thomas’s poem make it very difficult to ground his meaning at all.
Look again at the poem to see if you can detect other examples of this larger- scale ‘textual’ level of
breaks and discontinuities. Note that omissions are important here, that is, when a text doesn’t tell us things
we would expect to be told. You might begin by asking whether the poet tells us why he refuses to mourn,
or rather, why the expressed intention of not doing so is not carried out.
The ’linguistic’ stage, finally, involves looking for moments in the poem when the adequacy of
language itself as a medium of communication is called into question. Such moments occur when, for
example, there is implicit or explicit reference to the unreliability or untrustworthiness of language. It may
involve, for instance, saying that something is unsayable; or saying that it is impossible to utter or describe
something and then doing so; or saying that language inflates, or deflates, or misrepresents its object, and
then continuing to use it anyway. In ‘A Refusal to Mourn’, for instance, the whole poem does what it says
it won’t do: the speaker professes his refusal to mourn, but the poem itself constitutes an act of mourning.
Then in the third stanza the speaker says that he will not ‘murder / The mankind of her going with a grave
truth’. This condemns all the accepted ways of speaking about this event, and the poet professes to stand
outside the available range of clichéd, elegiac stances or ‘discursive practices’, as if some ‘pure’ stance
beyond these necessarily compromised forms of utterance were possible. Yet this is followed, not by
silence, but by the solemn, quasi-liturgical pronouncements of the final stanza: ’Deep with the first dead
lies London’s daughter’, the speaker proclaims, which sounds very like traditional panegyrical oratory,
with the dead person transformed into some larger than life heroic figure, becoming ’London’s daughter’
19
(an impossible designation for her in life), ’robed’ as for some great procession of the dead of all the ages,
and now reunited with Mother Earth in the form of the London clay in which she is now buried.
In this poem, we might say, Thomas identifies the language trap, and then falls into it. Look again at
the poem with this ’textual’ level in mind. Are there other examples of Thomas’s being forced to use the
rhetorical strategies he has just exposed? You might start by looking at his use of the words ‘mother’ and
’daughter’ and thinking about the nature of the metaphorical ‘family’ implied by these words. Other
metaphorical constructs to look at are those entailed in the word ’murder’ and in the notion of the
‘unmourning’ Thames.
Once the grain of the poem is opened up, then, it cannot long survive the deconstructive pressures
brought to bear upon it, and reveals itself as fractured, contradictory, and symptomatic of a cultural and
linguistic malaise. A three-step model like this will lend itself to applications to other material; it gives this
approach something distinctive as a critical practice, and lays the strengths and weaknesses of
deconstruction open to scrutiny, just as other methods are open. The deconstructive reading, then, aims to
produce disunity, to show that what had looked like unity and coherence actually contains contradictions
and conflicts which the text cannot stabilise and contain. We might characterise it as waking up the sleeping
dogs of signification and setting them on each other. In contrast, more conventional styles of close reading
had the opposite aim: they would take a text which appeared fragmented and disunified and demonstrate
an underlying unity, aiming to separate the warring dogs and soothe them back to sleep with suitable
blandishments. Yet the two methods, far apart though they would see themselves as being, suffer from
exactly the same drawback, which is that both tend to make all poems seem similar. The close reader
detects miracles of poised ambiguity alike in Donne’s complex metaphysical lyrics, and in simple poems
like Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by woods on a snowy evening’, which receive the full- scale explicatory
treatment of the ten- or twenty-page article, so that the experience of reading them loses all its particularity.
Similarly, after the deconstructionist treatment all poems tend to emerge as angst-ridden, fissured
enactments of linguistic and other forms of indeterminacy (Barry 71-76).

In the following video you will be able to go deeper into the deconstructivist analysis of
Dylan Thomas’s poem.

VIDEOCLASS:

Análisis del poema: “A Refusal…” by Dylan Thomas. Dr. Dídac Llorens.

Summary:

READ the document Guiding Questions for Text Analysis (pdf) (Curso Virtual/
Work Plan/ Unit 3).

Self-Study activities

1. Read carefully Barry’s post-structuralist interpretation of Dylan Thomas’ poem. Barry

identifies three stages in the deconstructive process: the verbal, the textual and the
linguistic. Summarize each stage and then look at the next answer section.

2. Barry’s analysis pays attention to the poem’s paradoxes and contradictions, its
breaks, discontinuities and omissions. Identify some of these inconsistencies and try
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to say how your reading is affected by them.

3. Barry also asks you to look for examples of a specific type of figurative language –
metaphors. He asks you to think about the use of ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ and the
“nature of the metaphorical ‘family’” implied by those words. Can you find examples
in addition to those mentioned in question 6 of the section “Analysis of Poetic
Elements”?

Answers.

1.Barry’s post-structuralist interpretation:

The verbal stage: this can involve a traditional form of close reading. Barry suggests
looking for paradoxes and contradictions, such as in the last line: “After the first death,
there is no other”. A first death implies a second, third, fourth, etc., in other words, there
will indeed be others. Poststructuralists argue that apparent contradictions like this point
to the unreliability and instability of language.
Barry reminds us that poststructuralists tend to question and overturn binary oppositions
or what Derrida terms “violent hierarchies” such as male/female, day/night, light/dark,
etc. Poststructuralists, thus, will privilege the second term and Barry notes that in the
poem it is darkness (and not light) which appears to create life. The poem gives us a
reality we can recognize, even if it inverts the terms by which we normally recognize
reality. Again, deconstructionists (a common alternative term in occasions for
poststructuralists) say that language creates its own reality and is not a reflection of that
reality. Another way of explaining how a poststructuralist reading inverts or overturns
familiar binary oppositions, is to say that it reads a text ‘against itself’, revealing how the
signifiers don’t match up with expected signifieds.
The textual stage: here the reader takes in the text as a whole and tries to identify
interruptions or changes in the flow of the poem. At the very least, these breaks and
slippages suggest an unstable rather than a fixed meaning, language or text. Barry points
to potential inconsistencies of focus, time, tone or point of view, among others. They can
be found in grammar (shift from first to third person, changes in verb tenses). The poem
presents significant shifts in time and viewpoint, moving from a geological time scale to
the present, then on to a historical perspective of the ‘unmourning’ and ‘riding Thames’.
Such discontinuities, Barry notes, make the poem extremely unstable and present major
difficulties in interpreting meaning. Lastly, he reminds us that what a text does not say –
its omissions – is often as important as what it should say or has led us to expect it to
say.
The linguistic stage: here the poststructuralist critic will look for moments where
language fails to communicate or when the unreliability of language is emphasized, as
in actually saying that something is unsayable. The poem is a good example, in that it
says it is not going to do something (mourn) and then proceeds to do just that. Barry
gives examples in the poem which illustrate how language can represent one thing and
express the opposite. The poem’s speaker expresses a certain intention (“I shall not
murder/The mankind of her going/[…]with any further/Elegy” ll. 14-18) only to find himself
betraying that intention (a gap in meaning and unreliability of language are identified
here).
Thus, a poststructuralist (or deconstructive) reading will expose disunity within the text,
21
however unified or stable it may appear at first sight.

2.The title already expresses a desire not to do something, which is immediately betrayed
by the poem itself. In other words, “A refusal to mourn…” announces its critique towards
(unveils the contradictions of) verbalizing a particular event, (in this case, the death of a
child) or the intention to transfer experience and emotion into language and the
accompanying ritual (mourning, elegy). The speaker thus gives us a poem (that is, an
object constructed of words and poetic strategies) about not wanting to give us a poem
at all.
This contradiction is continued in the tension between the two opening words, “Never
until” – a virtual binary opposition, since it juxtaposes a word which means “at no time,
on no occasion” with a word meaning “up to the time of”.
Other examples: “Tells with silence” (l. 4); “I shall not murder/[…] her going/[…]/with any
further/Elegy” (ll. 14- 18), a refusal to mark the child’s death with elegiac statements,
followed by “the solemn, quasi-liturgical pronouncements of the final stanza […], which
sounds very like traditional panegyrical oratory, with the dead person transformed into
some larger than life heroic figure” (Barry, 73).
Part of the effect of the poem’s strategy is to set up expectations in the reader (we expect
the speaker not to mourn, we anticipate perhaps a rejoicing or a celebration instead of
an elegy or lament) and systematically to frustrate them. This gives the poem a kind
up/down, push/pull movement, paralleling the waves of the sea “tumbling in harness” –
swelling first, then tumbling or crashing down – and “the riding Thames”.
The entire shape of the poem mimics the movement of water, with the up/down (or
expectation/frustration) movement in consonance with the death that is in life. (This
relates to question and answer 10 in the section Analysis of Poetic Elements.

3. Possibly the most striking (and difficult!) metaphor comes in the second stanza:
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn (ll. 7-9)

The speaker continues the water imagery and introduces two unrelated others – “Zion”
and “synagogue” – both associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Critics interpret
this opaque metaphor as an allusion to the speaker’s own death, but also to the
universality of death and, by extension, to the circularity of existence (“the round water
bead”): its constant renewal. Both "Zion" and "synagogue" refer to places or spaces into
which the speaker "must enter", and they draw on their traditional Biblical meanings.
"Zion" stands for the return to the Promised Land, especially during the Jews' exiles and
slavery in Egypt and Babylon as well as during their diaspora. Hence, "Zionism" is the
political movement that strove to establish the State of Israel. Here these two words are
not used in their religious sense, but only metaphorically. "Zion" is identified with "water
bead", and the idea that the speaker must "enter" this "water bead" means that the
speaker, some part of him, an infinitesimal part of the water that he contains, must return
to being water in nature. The word "bead" in turn adds the Catholic connotations of the
beads of the Rosary, connotations that would be lost if the image is read through the
more literal expression "water drop".
The word "synagogue" is used very much like the word Church, used allegorically to
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signify the whole Jewish community. Its relation to the image “ear of corn” can be varied.
Ear of corn in the Genesis implies the potential growth of nature, the way a wild root can
become a fruitful plant; it represents the fertile soil of the Nile river (so this is not the
image of a “cob”). Therefore, this is connected to the unending cycle of life, growth and
death in nature.
Another complex identification is based on the literal meaning of the word "shibboleth",
which is a Hebrew word that in the Bible is used in Judges 12:6 to distinguish and
persecute a specific Jewish group because of their incapacity to pronounce the word.
This Hebrew word means "stream of water" and connects with the previous image in the
poem. It has also come to mean quite a number of different things in modern English,
which your are invited to check here: https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/shibboleth.
However, in the context of Dylan Thomas's poem, it is used in its literal meaning in
Hebrew: the speaker is to return to the community of the elements in the earth that will
eventually nurture the ears of corn. The idea is that he must die and decompose and
return to the earth. It is an image of the cycle of life, but it is devoid of any idea of individual
spiritual transcendence, and it is circumscribed to the mere physical aspect of life as
biological process.
The ‘mother’ metaphor is introduced in the last stanza in which the speaker evokes the
resting place (the earth) of the child in anthropomorphic terms (i.e. by using
personification or allegory). The child is among ‘long friends’, those other corpses that
were buried there in the past and are now intermingled with the earth and have been
'close' like people who have been 'friends' for 'a long time'. They are now together as the
"grains beyond the ages" of the earth, in the ground where she is now buried, which is
also the ‘dark veins’ of ‘her mother’.
The image of the child "robed" in the "veins" of the (mother) earth is a striking one and
reiterates the theme of life going back to her origins, it recalls pregnancy, it also has a
pagan pre-Christian sound to it. But just like the Judeo-Christian images, these allegories
are used paradoxically, emphasizing the child's death and return to nature and denying
the survival of her spirit, soul or individual consciousness in the afterlife. It denies the
existence of such an afterlife. The images express an atheist, naturalistic attitude to life
(the belief in naturalism, human life and consciousness are just part of nature and the
physical world and there is nothing else; no soul, no spiritual plane or reality).
(Suggestion: it could be useful for your study and understanding of the poem that you
created your own bank of “metaphors” from the poem together with your interpretation:
you can use the ones analyzed in Question 6 of “Analysis of Poetic Elements” and this
previous question)

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 3.2. CRITICAL AUTHORS

In this section we will take a closer look at one of the main figures of Post-structuralism
and Deconstruction: the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. We are also going to read
fragments of one of his most relevant work.

JACQUES DERRIDA (1930-2004).

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was the

founder of “deconstruction,” a way of
criticizing not only both literary and
philosophical texts but also political
institutions. Although Derrida at times
expressed regret concerning the fate of the
word “deconstruction,” its popularity
indicates the wide-ranging influence of his
thought, in philosophy, in literary criticism
and theory, in art and, in particular,
architectural theory, and in political theory.
Indeed, Derrida’s fame nearly reached the
status of a media star, with hundreds of
people filling auditoriums to hear him
speak, with films and televisions programs
devoted to him, with countless books and
articles devoted to his thinking. Beside
critique, Derridean deconstruction consists in an attempt to re-conceive the difference that divides self-
consciousness (the difference of the “of” in consciousness of oneself). But even more than the re-
conception of difference, and perhaps more importantly, deconstruction attempts to render justice. Indeed,
deconstruction is relentless in this pursuit since justice is impossible to achieve. (Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy)

READ the following excerpt from Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology

(1967)

[T]he writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by
definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself […] be governed by the
system. And the reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer,
between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he
uses. This relationship is […] a signifying structure that critical reading should produce.
What does produce mean here? In my attempt to explain that, I would initiate a justification
of my principles of reading. […]
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 To produce this signifying structure obviously cannot consist of reproducing, by the effaced
and respectful doubling of commentary, the conscious, voluntary, intentional relationship that the
writer institutes in his exchanges with the history to which he belongs thanks to the element of
language. This […] doubling commentary should no doubt have its place in a critical reading. […]
Yet if reading must not be content with doubling the text, it cannot legitimately transgress the text
toward something other than it[self], toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical,
psycho-biographical, etc.) or toward a *signified outside the text whose content could take place,
could have taken place outside of language, that is to say, […] outside of writing in general. […] [We
propose] the absence of the *referent or the *transcendental signified. There is nothing outside of the
text [there is no outside-text; il n’y a pas de hors-texte]. […] [T]here has never been anything but
writing; […]
Although it is not commentary, our reading must be intrinsic and remain within the text. [Yet
there are] interpretation[s] that take us outside of the writing toward a psycho- biographical signified,
or even toward a general psychological structure that could […] be separated from the *signifier […].
[I]t seems to us in principle impossible to separate, through interpretation or commentary, the
signified from the signifier […]. Here we must take into account the history of the text in general.
When we speak of the writer and of the encompassing power of language to which he is subject, we
are not only thinking of the writer in literature. [We are thinking of] the philosopher, the chronicler,
the theoretician in general, and […] everyone writing […]. But, in each case, the person writing is
inscribed in a determined textual system. […] The philosophical text, although it is in fact always
written, includes, precisely as its philosophical specificity, the project of effacing itself in the face of
the signified content which it transports and in general teaches. Reading should be aware of this
project […]. The entire history of texts, and within it the history of literary forms in the West, should
be studied from this point of view. […] Literary writing has, almost always and almost everywhere,
according to some fashions and across very diverse ages, lent itself to this transcendent reading,
in that search for the signified which we here put in question, not to annul it, but to understand it
within a system to which such a reading is blind.
Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (3rd edition, 2018).

Self-Study activities.

1.Read the above extract carefully, several times if necessary. It will become gradually less
difficult and opaque.

2.Look up and give definitions of the words marked with an *asterisk.

3.What do you think Derrida means when he speaks of the “relationship, unperceived by
the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of
the language he uses” (par. 1)?

4.In this text, Derrida talks about writing and reading. Re- read the nine lines “Yet if reading
must not be content … remain within the text” (par. 2). Try to paraphrase Derrida’s
comments. (Paraphrase means “to restate a text, passage, or work giving the meaning in
another form”, Merriam Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus).

5.What do you think Derrida means when he writes “there is nothing outside of the text”
(par. 2)?

6.Summarize the extract, taking into account your answers to the above questions.

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Answers

1.Reading means understanding the text, so you have to make an effort involving reading
comprehension. If you feel that you missed something or still find the text confusing, then
you need to read it again.

2.*Signified, *referent, *transcendental signifier, *signifier. Derrida is using these terms

in a classic poststructuralist way. We can understand them more or less like this:
o signifier/signified = word/meaning.
o referent is roughly interchangeable with signified.
o transcendental signified denotes an ultimate, fixed meaning (Barthes might call this
a meaning or message of the Author-God). Derrida is critical of the search for a
transcendental signified or supreme meaning in the text or language.

3.Derrida is skeptical of the writer’s supposed authorial/authoritative command over what

he produces. He says that only the reader is able to perceive the tension (“relationship”)
between what a writer thinks he can control and what he can’t (“what he commands and
what he does not command”). Thus, Derrida questions the validity of a reading which
accepts the writer’s authority over his text and its meaning, and encourages a critical
reading instead which perceives the text’s discrepancies and contradictions (gaps,
fissures) from where meanings will emerge.

4.Reading cannot simply reproduce a text. Neither can it look for meaning (a referent, a
signified) which may be historical, biographical, psychological, etc., outside the text.
Reading can only seek meaning inside a text or writing: “Our reading must remain within
the text”. Ultimate meaning or interpretation which lies beyond the text (transcendental
signified) does not exist according to Derrida and his followers.

5.See the answer above.

6.Your summary must include the main ideas of the text briefly and in simple English and
it must not distort the main information of the text. If you find that your summary is not
faithful to the text, then rewrite it.

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IMPORTANT NOTE:
The information contained in these keys to the study activities is not supposed to
be memorised. You are supposed to develop your capacity to integrate this
information into your reading and understanding of the poem and use it in a
flexible way to answer the PEC or exam questions using your own writing skills
instead of word-for-word memorisation. These keys do not constitute a final
reading or an exhaustive commentary of the text. You will of course find further
nuances and possibilities in the text and you are expected to produce your own
ideas when discussing texts as long as they are solidly expressed and based on
the text itself (that is, looking for the evidence in the text that supports your ideas)
and a well founded critical reading.

TAKE PART in the “Discussion Group” actively sharing your ideas and comments (in
an economic and short paragraph) on the quotation ‘There is no outside-text’” (there is
nothing outside the text) that we will create in the Unit 3 Forum. Other Activities will be
also posted. We look forward to seeing you there!

4. QUIZ

➢ ANSWER the Quiz located in the Virtual Course. The Quiz is an exercise for you
to check if you have assimilated the contents of the unit.

5. REFERENCES

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory. An Introduction to literary and cultural theory.

Manchester University Press. 2009.

Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism. An Introduction to Theory and Practice. Longman.

2011.

Brooks, Cleanth and Warren, Robert P. Understanding Poetry. Cengage Learning. 1976.

Castle, Gregory. The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory. Blackwell Publishing. 2007.

Klarer, Mario. An introduction to Literary Studies. 3rd edition. Routledge. 2013.

Leitch, Vincent B., at al. Eds. Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 3rd edit. 2018.

Mays, Kelly J. The Norton Introduction to Literature. Shorter 12th edition. Norton. 2017.

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Palmer, Donald D. Structuralism and Poststructuralism for Beginners. Writers and
Readers Publishing. 1997.

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Eds. Literary Theory. An Anthology. Blackwell
Publishing. 2004.

6. FURTHER RESOURCES

Dylan Thomas Centre.

Dylan Thomas. BBC. “Discover the life, work and legacy of Welsh poet and broadcaster
Dylan Thomas.

Understanding Derrida, Deconstruction and Of Grammatology.

Key Theories of Jacques Derrida.

Glossary of Poetics Terms. “Poststructuralism”. Poetry Foundation.

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