20 pages • 40 minutes read
Alberto RíosWhen There Were Ghosts
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“When There Were Ghosts” is a free-verse poem that uses elements of magical realism. The 24 lines are broken into couplets: 12 stanzas of two lines each. The structure of the couplets mirrors the poem’s thematic borderlands and blending: Two lines mirror two towns (Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico), two times (past and present), and two projected images (on the smoke and on the screen). This puts the form and content in harmony, all working together to advance the ideas of the poem. There is no set meter: Lines vary in length and syllabic stresses.
Enjambment
Many sentences of the poem continue across lines and even stanzas. Not ending a sentence at the end of a line is called enjambment. Structurally, throughout the poem, enjambment represents how the speaker crosses to “the Mexico side” (Line 1) of Nogales in his childhood. One specific example of enjambment across stanza is:
So that María Félix and Pedro Armendáriz
Looked a little like my aunt and one of my uncles—
And so they were, and so were we all in the movies,
Which is how I remember it: Popcorn in hand,
Smoke in the air, gum on the floor— (Lines 17-21)
This passage contains three stanzas. The center stanza holds elements from the stanzas above and below it. The first quoted stanza establishes a comparison between specific movie stars and specific family members. The second quoted stanza develops this, making a large inclusive statement about everyone in the movie theater audience. Then, the second quoted stanza switches to describing the non-human elements of the theater, such as food. The third stanza picks up this list of sensory details.
Enjambment places the collective idea of “we all” alongside shared gustatory and olfactory experiences (the senses of taste and smell). In other words, a collective group of people, like movie theater goers, has a shared set of experiences that helps them recall a time in the past.
Repetition
Throughout the poem, Ríos repeats letters, words, and phrases. Alliteration is using several words that begin with the same letter close to one another in a poem. Many adjacent, or nearly adjacent, words begin with the letter ‘s,’ such as the lines “we ourselves / Were the story and the stuff and the stars” (Lines 22-23). This soft repetition is hypnotic and conjures up the feeling of the dream state the poet discusses.
The repeated use of the word “the” instead of simply using commas is an example of polysyndeton. This forces the reader to pay attention to each individual piece of a list instead of letting things blend together. While the statement suggests a unity of all the people in the theater being all the things at once, it also suggests a complexity and a layering that mimics the layering of the images in the poem.
In addition to Line 23, the word “story” appears in Line 9 twice. This is a different type of repetition—the same word being used in different stanzas. While alliteration offers a repetition of sound, which is an auditory device about the closeness of the words, the repetition of the same word in different locations throughout a poem is more about the idea the word represents.
Ríos uses lyrical, or musical, devices like consonance across lines. The repetition of the word “story” is a kind of musical refrain—a return to a central idea rather than a unifying sound. The heart of “When There Were Ghosts” is a story about the speaker’s childhood, but it is written from a point in the present, which creates a sense of repetition in that the speaker is recalling something that has already occurred.
