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Shaving Poem Summary

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In Richard Blanco's dramatic poem Shaving, the author uses metaphor and inner dialogue to emphasize the shift in tone from tranquility to melancholic nostalgia in the first and second stanzas, ultimately revealing that death is not the end of a person's impact on the world and their legacy and teachings have a significant impact on those they were close to well into that person's adulthood. The first stanza of Blanco's Shaving constantly uses metaphor in order to offer the reader an introspective look into the narrator's thoughts while he shaves. In the first stanza, Blanco compares the practice of shaving to the many workings of nature, comparing the ritual of sorts to 'ocean steam rising to form clouds' and 'the bloom of spiderwebs each …show more content…

While the first stanza emphasizes the inevitability of death and the comfort of memory, the second stanza feels much more melancholic and, at some points, angry. The narrator is still using metaphor to explain how shaving reminds him of his father, but the metaphor is no longer comparing his father's passing to nature; it instead compares the narrator's own beard with that of his father's, revealing that the narrator is seeing parts of this father in himself, for better or for worse. In the second stanza, the narrator compares the whiskers of his own beard to 'dead pieces of the self from the face that never taught me how to shave,' revealing that the memory of this father oftentimes feels more like a mystery than a keepsake. We can see from this line that the narrator's relationship with his father was, in the eyes of the narrator, incomplete. The fact that the narrator's father never taught him how to shave implies that the father died early in the narrator's life, before that skill would ever become important to the narrator. The narrator is missing significant life lessons from his father, and as he slowly sees his father in himself, he fears that he is unprepared, that the torch was not properly passed on and that he has too much to learn with no one to teach it to him. Apart from just metaphor, we can see this sense of fear

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