Abuelito Who

Sandra Cisneros

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1922

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form & Meter

Cisneros’s poem “Abuelito Who” utilizes a loose iambic pentameter and is written in free verse as one stanza. The syllables within each line vary at random intervals, and the shortest being “is sick” (Line 13) with two syllables. Up until the end of the last line, the poem lacks any punctuation, and this stream-of-consciousness single-stanza form emphasizes the undifferentiated quality of a child’s thought; the speaker says not that Abuelito reminds her of “dough and feathers” (Line 3), for example, but that he is these things. Abuelito, and experiences associated with him, form a single imaginative entity—and the poem’s form mirrors this. The single stanza with no regular meter additionally reinforces the child’s voice; more traditional forms would bring an element of restraint and sophistication at odds with the tone and overall world of a child’s imagination. Cisneros does not attempt to align herself with tradition, although her simple syntax and stream of associations do refer to writers like Gwendolyn Brooks and Gertrude Stein. In one stanza, the poem demonstrates how an individual person or thing can change into something new without a definitive break to represent that change.

Rhyme

The poem does not have a consistent rhyme scheme but utilizes rhyme as a literary device in the center of the poem, with no significant rhymes at the beginning or end. The major rhyme scheme begins with “can’t come out to play” (Line 10), and the following two lines are end rhymed, “sleeps in his little room all night and day / who used to laugh like the letter k” (Lines 11-12). The following six lines continue with the end rhymed couplets: “sick” (Line 13) and “stick” (Line 14), “door” (Line 15) and “anymore” (Line 16), and “bed” (Line 17) and “head” (Line 18). The rhymes come at a time in the poem where the speaker is actively processing the traumatic change with her grandfather. The rhymes work specifically within the section of the poem directly dealing with Abuelito’s sickness, and once the sickness is over, the rhyme tapers off completely. Thus, the rhyme builds momentum during the most stressful and challenging part of this experience with her grandfather. Almost like a coping mechanism, the rhyme acts as a vehicle that helps move the speaker through this difficult place, enforcing the constraint of rhyme to keep the speaker moving. The rhyme ends when the difficult time is over, letting the speaker revert back to free verse.

Parallelism

In grammar, parallelism is a balance within one or more sentences of similar phrases or clauses that have the same grammatical structure. The application of parallelism affects readability and may make texts easier to process. Parallelism appears throughout “Abuelito Who” with the consistent use of present tense and repeated use of “who” and “is” as lines’ beginning words. Cisneros uses repetition not only to call attention to the word being repeated, but the repetition of a word or image also contributes to semantic instability. This means that a particular meaning derived initially, when repeated, will cause the reader to revise that meaning retrospectively. The poem utilizes repetition, specifically a repeating sentence structure expanding and modifying the word “Abuelito.” Each line in the poem is a restatement or expansion on Abuelito, broadening the description of the older man and making the reader think critically about who Abuelito was to the speaker. Not only does Cisneros do this to enhance readability, but it is also another example of writing in the child’s voice. The repetitive and derivative nature of each sentence lacks linguistic creativity, and its grammatical structure is easy to imagine coming from a child’s mouth.