Summary Of Richard Blanco's Poem 'Shaving'

Lane Nelson Mrs. Mandy Feasel English Composition II 25 March 2024 Title “Shaving” is a metaphoric poem that showcases how the death of a father is the same as the creation of rain. Richard Blanco’s 1998 poem “Shaving” illustrates how life goes by and the way it travels. This poem showcases how life is short and precious things can disappear at any moment. Blanco enriches this theme through the use of literary devices that convey the importance of a role model and how short life can be. The poem “Shaving” has three stanzas. In the first stanza, Blanco gives examples of things like “the bloom of spiderwebs, the drink roses take” and “the fall of fresh rain” (lines 5, 7-8). In the second stanza, Blanco describes how he is connected to his father through a “legacy of whiskers” (line 18).

Blanco’s literary devices address how simple concepts make big impacts, such as water vapor turning into a rain storm to replenish a rose and a spiderweb forming on the rose for a spider to live. Richard Blanco’s poem “Shaving” has figurative devices with the meaning of his late father. In line 3, Blanco talks about the beard’s “silent labor” and then later talks about his father’s “legacy of whiskers that grow like black seeds” (line 18). The labor and legacy convey that the father has worked tirelessly to leave a lasting legacy for his family. The father more than likely worked all his life and did not spend most of his time with his son teaching him how to shave. The father's work led him to die before making memories with his son. Blanco's figurative language shows the repetition of life and the silence of how it works. All the repetition relates back to him shaving his beard and his father shaving, showing how life is never a never-ending legacy of “black seeds.”(line