Summary Of Shaving By Richard Alvarez

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In the poem, “shaving” by Richard Blanco, the speaker incorporates the use of vivid imagery and metaphor in order to portray the complex associations between the short-lived life of the speaker's father whom he knew to a limited extent, the ritual of shaving a beard, and the cyclic, subtle yet significant occurrences of nature. To begin, the speaker compares his beard to “a creation of silent labor, like ocean steam rising to form clouds” and the “ bloom of spiderwebs each morning”, which serve as real-life applications for the audience to grasp a deeper understanding of the oblivion towards such silent yet noticeable performances in life. Through this comparative analysis, the speaker indicates that his fathers life flashing before his eyes …show more content…

This routine of rain becoming a river and rain again serves to emphasize the cyclical, yet often overlooked conduct of the progression of age, and span of life that comes with it. Over time, one's features have the potential to depict the way they interpret their own identity. With this, the speaker reminisces upon the mornings he shaves his beard, and the emotions and thought processes that follow. For example, while shaving the speaker remembers “ him in a masquerade of foam, then, as if it was his beard I took the blade to, the memory of him in tiny snips of black whiskers swirling in the drain-- dead pieces of the self from the face that never taught me how to shave. His legacy of whiskers that grow like black seeds sown over my cheek and chin, my own flesh.with a full beard and the blade in my hand, when my eyes don't recognize themselves in a mirror echoed with a hundred faces”. Evidently the speaker recognizes, “him”, his father, in himself given his beard is grown out. The speaker's beard conjures a sense of disassociation within the speaker, which may portray the ritual of shaving as the motion of eliminating the aspects that link the father and speaker

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