The verbal, the textual and the linguistic stages,
a) The verbal
The verbal stage is very similar to that of more conventional forms of close reading. 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 not 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.
b) The Textual stage
The 'textual' stage of the method moves beyond individual phrases and taxes 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 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 the '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', descents. 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 un mourning 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.
c) The Linguistic stage
Involves looking for moments in the poem when the adequacy of language itself as a medium of communication is called in to question. Such moments occur when, for example, there is implicit or explicit reference to the unreliability of 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 their 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 and act of mourning.
