Reading Four Poems Three Times: A Record of How My Interpretations Changed
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A Few Words Before We Begin
I didn't plan this as an experiment. It just turned out that way.
For a recent task I ended up reading the same four poems — Dylan Thomas's "A Refusal to Mourn," Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow," Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, and Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" three separate times, at three different depths. First I just sat with them and wrote down what I noticed on my own, no notes, no secondary sources, just me and the text. Then I went and read what LitCharts, SparkNotes, GradeSaver, and a handful of other sites had to say, and checked my instincts against actual scholarship. Then, last, I ran both the original readings and the researched ones through a deconstructive framework, treating the poems as sites of contradiction rather than settled meaning.
What surprised me is how differently the same four poems look at each stage. Sometimes my first instinct held up. Sometimes it turned out I'd stumbled onto something that scholars had already documented properly. And sometimes the deconstructive pass cracked open a tension I hadn't even noticed was there. I've kept all three layers below, mostly as I wrote them, because I think the gap between them is the actual point.
Part One: What I Noticed on My Own
1. "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" — Dylan Thomas
The title itself creates a paradox for me. Thomas says he refuses to mourn, yet the poem itself is mourning. This contradiction shows me something true: I cannot write about death without mourning it.
I notice Thomas uses two types of language: religious words ("Zion," "synagogue") and natural words ("water," "corn," "seed"). I feel neither alone is enough to express this loss. He needs both because a child's death is too big for any single way of speaking.
The last line, "After the first death, there is no other," sounds comforting at first, as if this death is unique and dignified. But I remember this poem is about the Blitz, when children died every night. The line claims singularity against a reality of repeated deaths. I find the poem's power in this tension between wanting to make this death special and facing the truth of countless deaths.
2. "The Red Wheelbarrow" — Williams
Williams gives me the grammar of importance "so much depends upon" but never tells me what depends or why. He only gives description: wheelbarrow, rain, chickens.
I think this gap is intentional. By not explaining, Williams makes me fill in my own meaning. Maybe it is about work, or paying attention to small things, or the objects we need in daily life but ignore. The poem never tells me if I am right or wrong.
What I find powerful is that just by saying "so much depends," Williams makes me feel it is important, even without justification. I see the poem showing that meaning can be felt without being explained.
3. Sonnet 18 — Shakespeare
Shakespeare promises his beloved will live forever through poetry "thy eternal summer shall not fade" in these "eternal lines."
But I see this immortality depends entirely on people continuing to read and preserve the poem. This is not real transcendence to me but a different kind of weakness: the poem can burn, get lost, or become unreadable over time.
I think Shakespeare may know this even while making his confident claim. I find the sonnet's power not in actually defeating death, but in trying to resist it. It is defiance while knowing it might fail, which I find more touching than simple confidence.
4. "In a Station of the Metro" — Pound
Pound presents pure Imagist practice, showing things directly without decoration. Yet I notice he cannot describe the faces without using metaphor. They become "petals on a wet, black bough."
This tells me that even Imagism cannot completely avoid figurative language. Perhaps seeing itself is already metaphorical; we understand new things by comparing them to what we already know.
I am particularly drawn to the word "apparition." It carries two opposite meanings for me: something appearing vividly and something ghostly, fading away. The faces are both intensely present and already disappearing. I find the poem holds both feelings together without choosing one, capturing how people in a crowd appear suddenly and vanish just as quickly.
Part Two: Checking My Readings Against the Scholarship
Here's how I'd write this up, having gone through LitCharts, Poem Analysis, SparkNotes, GradeSaver, and a few other sites for each poem.
1. "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" — Dylan Thomas
Reading through the material, I now understand the poem sits inside a specific historical moment. According to LitCharts, it responds to a child killed during Germany's air raids on London in WWII, and the speaker resists writing a conventional elegy while still capturing the tragedy in intense language. That clears something up for me: the "refusal" in the title was never a real refusal, it was always ironic, and multiple sources agree on this.
GradeSaver's summary helped me place the opening stanza better. It explains that the poem is really about the inevitability of death and the pointlessness of mourning those lost in war, and that the first stanza sets up London at what feels like the end of the world, with the sea coming to a standstill. I hadn't connected that "still hour" and "sea tumbling in harness" to that reading before; I was treating it more abstractly.
The EBSCO Research Starters piece gave me language for something I'd noticed but couldn't name. It points out that Thomas blends religious and natural imagery throughout, suggesting the sacred and the earthly are interconnected, and treats the child's death as transformation rather than ending. So my instinct that Zion and synagogue were being mixed with water bead and ear of corn wasn't just me imagining a tension. That's actually the documented structure of the poem.
PoetryVerse gave me the clearest reading of "I shall not murder." It explains that when the speaker says he will not murder her death with a grave truth, he means that conventional mourning rituals reduce a life to a story the living control, and his refusal is an attempt to protect the child from becoming an emblem. That reframed the whole poem for me. It's not that Thomas is cold, it's that he thinks turning her into a moral lesson would be its own kind of violence.
On the final line, I found two different readings. One source reads it as being about the soul: the "first death" refers to physical death, since the soul cannot die, only the body can. LitCharts reads it more universally, suggesting all deaths are tragic and inevitable, so mourning one person is really mourning everyone, including ourselves. I think I prefer the second reading. It fits better with the cyclical, elemental imagery running through the whole poem.
2. "The Red Wheelbarrow" — William Carlos Williams
This one surprised me most once I read around it. I always assumed the ambiguity of "so much depends upon" was the whole point, and SparkNotes actually confirms that instinct: we never find out what exactly depends on the wheelbarrow, though the speaker clearly has a sentimental attachment to the rural scene being described.
What I didn't know was the biographical backstory. LitCharts explains that Williams later revealed the wheelbarrow belonged to an African American neighbor, not to a dying patient as some scholars had assumed, and that his affection for the man seems to have entered the poem without him fully intending it. Knowing that changes how I read the poem now. It feels less like a purely detached imagist exercise and more like something quietly personal leaking through an objective style.
The Bachelor and Master source gave me a phrase I want to hold onto: the idea that the poem enacts Williams's own principle, "no ideas but in things." It explains the wheelbarrow itself becomes the poem, similar to how a painting is the actual object it depicts rather than a description of it. That helped me understand why the poem resists paraphrase. It isn't pointing at an idea, it's trying to be the thing itself.
3. Sonnet 18 — Shakespeare
The LitCharts breakdown confirmed something I suspected but hadn't fully worked out. It notes that Shakespeare tries out a number of conventional metaphors and finds each one wanting, before landing on an unusual comparison: that the young man's beauty is best expressed by comparing him to the poem itself. So the "argument" of the sonnet isn't really about summer at all. Summer is just the thing that fails so the poem can offer itself as the better answer.
The CliffsNotes/LitCharts material pushed me further on this. It states plainly that the young man's beauty may be eternal, but only because of the poem, and the speaker's argument slips into circularity here. That's exactly the tension I wanted language for. The sonnet claims to defeat time, but the mechanism it uses is entirely dependent on the poem being read.
The Studocu source added a detail I like: the poem survives only as long as "men can breathe or eyes can see" an ambitious and almost pretentious claim, since Shakespeare imagines his poem will always be read, and the poem depends entirely on its readers to fulfill that promise. Reading this, I feel more confident saying the sonnet's confidence is a kind of performance, resting on something as fragile as continued readership.
4. "In a Station of the Metro" — Ezra Pound
The Wikipedia entry gave me useful context I didn't have. It explains that Pound based the poem on an actual moment in a Paris metro station in 1912, and felt the faces were better captured through an "equation" than through direct description. That word "equation" stuck with me. It explains why the poem just places two images side by side without a verb connecting them.
Poem Analysis gave me a reading of the structure that I found convincing. It says the poem places "faces in the crowd" and "petals on a wet, black bough" beside each other, and the meaning comes from their connection rather than from any direct statement, since the poem contains no verbs and feels more like a still image than a moving scene. That answered something I was unsure about whether the missing verb was a stylistic quirk or central to the meaning. It's clearly the latter.
On the word "apparition," a commentary source gave me the clearest gloss: the word literally means the supernatural appearance of a person or thing, and it gives a ghostly feeling to the faces of strangers the narrator will see only briefly before they vanish from his life forever. That confirmed the reading I already leaned toward that Pound is holding presence and fading together in a single image.
Going through all this material, I notice something across all four poems that I didn't fully see before doing this reading: every single one of them depends on something outside the poem to complete its own claim mourning rituals it distrusts, a wheelbarrow scene it won't explain, readers it needs centuries from now, a crowd of strangers who will vanish in seconds. None of the poems are self-contained the way I used to assume good poems should be.
Part Three: A Deconstructive Reading
Once I noticed that pattern, I wanted to push on it properly using an actual theoretical framework rather than just my own observation. As a deconstructionist, my task is not to unearth a hidden, unified "truth" beneath Dylan Thomas's "A Refusal to Mourn," but rather to expose the fault lines within the text itself. By reading the poem against its own grain, we can observe how its language subverts its stated intentions.
I'll dismantle each poem using two frameworks: first, a three-stage deconstructive methodology (verbal, textual, linguistic), and second, the lens of semiotics and the primacy of the signifier.
1. Dylan Thomas, "A Refusal to Mourn"
The Verbal Stage. At the purely verbal level, the poem is built upon self-refuting paradoxes that highlight the endemic unreliability of language. The final line, "After the first death, there is no other," is a logical contradiction, as designating something as the "first" inherently implies a sequence of a second, third, or fourth. The poem immediately establishes temporal friction by pairing the words "never" and "until." The text also reverses traditional binary oppositions by positioning "darkness," rather than light, as the force that engenders life, noting the "Fathering and all humbling darkness." These contradictions show the signifiers warring with the signified, proving that language here does not reflect our world, but instead constitutes a kind of virtual reality of its own.
The Textual Stage. Zooming out, we look for shifts and breaks that expose a lack of a fixed, unified perspective. The poem lacks a smooth chronological progression, shifting violently across different scales of time. The first two stanzas focus on geological aeons and the eventual "end of the world," where the cycle of life ceases. The third stanza abruptly shifts to the immediate present to focus on the child's actual death. The final stanza shifts again to the broad historical progression of recorded London. Because of these dislocations, the text fails to provide a single wider context to frame the child's death, which makes it difficult to ground the poem's meaning at all.
The Linguistic Stage. Ultimately, the poem calls the adequacy of language itself into question by doing exactly what it claims it will not do. The speaker explicitly professes a refusal to mourn, yet the poem functions as an undeniable act of mourning. The speaker claims he will not "murder" the child's death with a "grave truth," condemning clichéd elegiac practices as if he could achieve a pure stance beyond compromised utterance. But immediately after exposing these available discursive practices, the poet falls into the very language trap he identified: he uses solemn, quasi-liturgical panegyric to transform the dead girl into a heroic figure, calling her "London's daughter" and describing her as "Robed" in death. The text reveals itself as fractured and unable to stabilize the conflicts it unleashes.
The Primacy of the Signifier. Shifting focus to imagery and rhythm, we can read Thomas's elegy not as a reflection of reality but as an isolation of signifiers. The poem's imagery isolates its subjects from the "noise" that surrounds them in actuality, moving away from referential reality. Much like Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow" uses colors and shapes to evoke an innocence not found on any real farm, Thomas's "Zion of the water bead" and "synagogue of the ear of corn" issue entirely from language rather than the world of things. These signifiers produce a set of associations that relegate the literal reality of a burning London to the edges of our interest.
The Kristevan Semiotic. The haunting quality of the poem relies heavily on what Julia Kristeva terms "the semiotic," a signifying capability derived from sound and rhythm rather than surface meaning. The semiotic evokes the rhythmic, pre-linguistic babbling of children and is linked by psychoanalysis to the drive toward pleasure or death. Thomas's dense, musical patterning disrupts the purely rational, thesis-making logic of the poem. The rhythmic authority of the poem's meter and its incantatory sound effects draw on sensations located beyond rational argument, subverting the text's "logical" refusal to mourn.
2. Williams, "The Red Wheelbarrow"
The Verbal Stage. The primary paradox lies in the immense, abstract weight of the opening assertion ("so much depends / upon") placed squarely on mundane, everyday objects. Post-structuralism often reverses binary oppositions; here, the backgrounded, ordinary tools of farm labor are "privileged" and elevated to objects of supreme, almost cosmic importance.
The Textual Stage. These fault-lines are highly visible in the physical structure of the stanzas. The breaking of compound words separating "wheel" from "barrow" and "rain" from "water" creates abrupt visual and grammatical shifts. These aggressive line breaks prevent a smooth reading, demonstrating a fragmented rather than unified reality.
The Linguistic Stage. The poem aggressively isolates physical objects but fails to tell us why "so much depends" on them. This prominent omission what the text glosses over in silence exposes a language trap: the poem asserts ultimate meaning but deliberately withholds the linguistic context required to understand it.
The Illusion of Materiality. Initially, the poem appears to assert the physical materiality of the objects it names. It seems to offer clearly defined colors and shapes of referential things, setting out to transmit the items directly to our imagination. It claims that "so much depends / upon" their solid existence in a substantial world. But reading against the grain reveals that the poem's colors the red and white are entirely unqualified, making them bright, shiny, "glazed." This depicts a farmyard devoid of shadows or mud.
Childlike Purity. Because of this hyper-clean imagery, it is easier to "see" a toy wheelbarrow or a scene from a children's picture book rather than a gritty, real-world farm. The poem depicts an innocence and purity that cannot be found on an actual farm.
Rhythmic Simplicity. The rhythms of the poem are simplicity itself, with each short stanza repeating the metrical pattern of the previous one with only minor variations. Ultimately, this interpretation argues that the red wheelbarrow we see in the poem issues from language itself, rather than from the actual world of physical things.
3. Pound, "In a Station of the Metro"
The Verbal Stage. The opening word, "apparition," introduces a glaring paradox: an apparition implies something ghostly, immaterial, and spectral, which actively contradicts the physical reality of the "faces in the crowd."
The Textual Stage. The most jarring fault-line is a structural omission: there are no verbs. By passing over action in silence, the poem abandons a smooth chronological progression. The sudden juxtaposition between a modern subway and a wet, black bough also creates a massive shift in focus, vocabulary, and setting.
The Linguistic Stage. By stripping away standard syntax, conjunctions, and narrative, Pound implicitly suggests that traditional linguistic description misrepresents its object. The poem abandons traditional linguistic connection entirely, relying on raw visual collision instead.
Isolating Reality. The poem works by proposing parallels and inviting the reader to make surprising connections between distinct signifiers. Rather than merely describing reality, the poem actively isolates the images of the faces and the petals from the contextual "noise" that would surround them in actuality.
Creating Associations through Difference. These signifiers produce powerful associations such as the vulnerability and delicacy of the faces by relying on stark differences: small faces and large crowds, pale petals and dark boughs, fragile things and substantial things.
Spectrality over Reference. Before we even reach the ethereal image of the "petals," the use of the word "apparition" strips the poem of referential reality. This creates a strange spectrality that ensures the faces are more than just physical referents.
The Semiotic Soundscape. Drawing on Kristeva, the poem's haunting quality stems from the semiotic a signifying capability rooted in sound that exists prior to the acquisition of meaning. These musical, patterned sound effects disrupt the purely "thetic," or rational, thesis-making logic of the text. The disruption is achieved through near-rhymes like "crowd" and "bough," or "petals" and "wet." Rhythm plays a crucial part too: a lighter pattern of short syllables in the first line is directly contrasted by the heavy authority of the three final stressed syllables, "wet, black bough."
4. Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
The Verbal Stage. The poem opens with a famous question, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" but immediately contradicts the premise of its own comparison by stating, "Thou art more lovely and more temperate." The poem reads against itself by using summer as its central metric for beauty while simultaneously arguing that summer is entirely inadequate for the task. Post-structuralism often reverses common binary oppositions, and here the traditional elevation of the sun "the eye of heaven" is subverted. Instead of being the ultimate source of life and beauty, the sun is depicted as oppressive ("too hot") and inconsistent ("his gold complexion dimm'd"), making the human subject the privileged, superior term.
The Textual Stage. The first eight lines are grounded in the natural, cyclical world, acknowledging that "summer's lease hath all too short a date" and that everything beautiful eventually declines. At line 9, "But thy eternal summer shall not fade," there is a massive shift in time and attitude. The text abruptly breaks from the reality of natural decay and leaps into an impossible, static eternity. There's also an important omission: for a poem supposedly dedicated to immortalizing a specific person, their actual physical description is entirely absent. We only know what they are not. The subject is passed over in silence.
The Linguistic Stage. The poem ends by explicitly claiming that language itself grants immortality: "So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." The speaker says that language inflates its object, and then continues to use it anyway. The poem attempts to conquer literal, biological death using metaphorical "eternal lines," exposing the sheer desperation of the speaker's attempt to substitute physical reality with linguistic constructs.
Isolating Reality. In this sonnet, the words "summer," "buds of May," and "shade" are isolated from the "noise" that would surround them in actuality. The poem is not actually about a literal summer's day or the weather. The signifier separates the comparison from distinct experiences in the referential world, producing a set of associations instead. The "rough winds" and the "dimm'd" sun create associations of brevity and vulnerability, relegating the reality of actual trees and weather to the edges of our interest.
The Semiotic vs. the Thetic. The rational, thetic logic of the poem that a human being will literally live forever because a poem was written about them is biologically false. But the poem's heavily patterned musicality, its steady iambic pentameter and strict rhyme scheme (see/thee), draws on sensations beyond surface meaning. It's the relentless, heartbeat-like rhythm of the semiotic drive that persuades the reader of the subject's immortality, overriding the rational mind's knowledge of death.
Where This Leaves Me
Three passes through the same four poems, and I don't think I ended up with a "correct" reading of any of them. What I got instead was a record of how far a poem can be stretched before it either breaks or reveals what it was hiding.
My first-pass instincts weren't wrong, exactly. The tension I felt in Thomas between refusal and mourning, the gap I noticed in Williams, the fragile confidence in Shakespeare, the doubled meaning of "apparition" in Pound: all of that held up under scholarship, and all of it held up under theory too. But each layer gave me a different vocabulary for the same discomfort. Research told me these weren't just my private impressions they were documented critical positions. Deconstruction told me why the discomfort was there in the first place: every one of these poems makes a claim it can't fully back up on its own terms, and needs something outside itself a reader, a ritual, a future, a stranger's face to close the gap.
If there's one thing I'd take from this into how I read going forward, it's that a poem's confidence is usually the most interesting thing to press on. Thomas refuses to mourn and mourns anyway. Shakespeare promises eternity and hands that promise to strangers he'll never meet. Pound tries to just show us something and can't stop himself from comparing it to something else. Even Williams, who says almost nothing, makes "so much depends" carry weight it never explains. None of them are lying, but none of them are quite telling the whole truth either. That seems like a fair description of what most good poems do.
📖 THREE PASSES, FOUR POEMS: WHAT EACH STAGE REVEALED
First Pass
Personal instinct — tensions felt before they could be named
Second Pass
Scholarship — instincts confirmed and vocabulary found
Third Pass
Deconstruction — the fault lines beneath every confident claim
📊 FOUR POEMS: THE CLAIM EACH CANNOT FULLY SUSTAIN
| Poem | The Claim | What It Needs Outside Itself |
|---|---|---|
| Thomas — "A Refusal to Mourn" | A refusal to perform conventional mourning | The very mourning rituals it distrusts |
| Williams — "The Red Wheelbarrow" | So much depends on these objects | A reader to supply the meaning it withholds |
| Shakespeare — Sonnet 18 | The beloved lives forever in these lines | Future readers it will never know |
| Pound — "In a Station of the Metro" | Pure image, no metaphor needed | The very metaphor it cannot avoid using |
📚 Works Cited
Barad, Dilip. “Deconstructive Analysis of Ezra Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ and William Carlos Williams’s ‘The Red Wheelbarrow.’” ResearchGate, July 2024.
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester UP, 2002.
Belsey, Catherine. Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2022.
Pound, Ezra. “In a Station of the Metro.” Poetry Foundation, Apr. 1913, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12675/in-a-station-of-the-metro.
Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” Poetry Foundation, 1609, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day.
Thomas, Dylan. “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.” Academy of American Poets, 1945, https://poets.org/poem/refusal-mourn-death-fire-child-london
Williams, William Carlos. “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Poetry Foundation, 1923, https://poets.org/poem/red-wheelbarrow
This analysis traces three successive readings of four canonical poems — Dylan Thomas, William Carlos Williams, Shakespeare, and Ezra Pound — moving from personal response through scholarship to deconstructive theory.
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