In the poem “shaving,” Richard Blanco presents tranquil images of nature, and dark

motifs of shaving to convey the speaker's view of the finality of his father’s death and how he
connects the ritual of shaving to the faded memory of his father, ultimately illustrating how the
loss of a parent is an event that can affect a person in every aspect of their life.

Blanco begins by using tranquil images of nature to highlight how the act of shaving
connects to both nature and the sudden death of his father. He begins these connections by
describing his beard as “like ocean steam rising to form clouds” and like “the bloom of
spiderwebs every morning.” He views the simple act of shaving as something as intrinsic as
nature itself. Shaving, like nature, is an act that brings him a sense of peace and stability, as to
him growing facial hair, and in turn shaving it, is something as sure and final as precipitation or a
spider building its web. These thoughts of nature begin to circle back to thoughts of his father,
thinking “I think of these slow and silent forces and how quietly my father’s life passed us by.”
Similar to shaving, he describes this loss as something that is just a fact and cannot be
controlled. As unstoppable of acts of nature, or his “creation of silent labor” growing his facial
hair, his father has passed and he is unable to stop these silent forces of nature. Because of his
fathers death being at a young age for the speaker, as described in “the face that never taught
me to shave,” he has accepted this death as just a part of his life and nearly a mystery to him,
like his ever growing facial hair. The enigma of his father leads him to attempt to know him
better, by connecting him to the things around him that cannot be changed. He wants to feel the
same sense of stability about this loss as he does shaving and nature. Though at parts he feels
this stability, he still makes an effort to “know his father” as he completes his everyday tasks.

Following the first stanza of the poem, the speaker shifts to dark motifs of the act of
shaving and his father, to illustrate how the loss of his father has affected him in every aspect of
his life. What are at first seen as connections he makes from his father to the world around him
drastically shift to a more all encompassing view on life when he begins to think “dead pieces of
the self from the face that never taught me to shave.” Though, the idea of his fathers death as
an idea is something he views as a fact of life, he feels that it has in some way, fundamentally
changed him. This loss being something as simple as nature in his eyes shows how much it
truly envelops his mind. He begins to struggle to think of anything else, even starting to compare
his own self to his father with “his legacy of whiskers that grow like black seeds sown over my
cheek and chin, my own flesh.” The speaker sees his fathers death as a part of his own identity,
as this loss is simply a fact of his life, it is simply a fact of him. This absence is something that
has so drastically altered him, that he feels synonymous with it. He reaches a point where he
can't even recognise himself when he looks in the mirror and thinks, “my eyes don’t recognise
themselves in a mirror echoed with a hundred faces.” He feels so lost in this identity that he has
lost his true self. This death happening in his youth (described as not yet being old enough to
shave at the time) made the impact much larger than what it may have been later in life. It has
affected his psyche on such a level that he feels that it is inescapable. He is forced to accept
that this loss is who he is and the large effects it has had on his life when he thinks “I must
understand the invisibility of life and the intensity of vanishing.” He recognizes this extreme
impact that has been made on his life and forces himself to begin to understand. This all
encompassing feeling is something Blanco purposefully described as beginning to describe how
the loss of a parent for a person, like the speaker, can feel inescapable.

The long term effects of a loss as impactful as a parent are something that can feel
unavoidable. As the speaker feels that he is his loss, many people feel unable to escape from
the griefs and traumas of their childhood. Through this poem Blanco conveys this feeling as an
attempt to make others feel understood in these emotions. The messages of how the loss of a
parent can affect people is something that cannot be missed and something that resonates with
many people