In the poem "Shaving," Richard Blanco utilizes effective literary elements, namely diction and selection of details, in order to convey the speaker's memories of the father, and illustrate how it has affected how he sees his life through the act of shaving, ultimately revealing the reality of growing up and the acceptance of loss.

A simple act of shaving in the morning reminds the speaker of the things that the father has done, or has not done, for him. The speaker talks about how his beard is "a creation of silent labor," an interesting word choice indicating how the growth of his beard seems like a work for him, and how he learned how to do it by himself, without the guidance of the father, because everything was "silent." It leads the speaker to have a silent moment to think about the details of it, from the "mystery" of how whiskers grow, to the "river" flowing so "silently." The river indicates the running water used to wash his face and all the whiskers away, slowly and silently, but in a greater sense, it also serves as a symbol as how his "father's life passed [him] by" so quickly. In the first stanza, the details and the symbol of running water help with the interpretation that the father might have been gone, for a yet unknown reason, leaving the speaker behind learning how to do this manly thing by his own. After talking about the silence of the shaving scene in the morning, and how it leads to the thought of the father, Blanco shifts to elaborate in details about how the father appeared in his son's eyes. The image of the father never escaped the speaker's mind. Even when "[he is] shaving," the memory of him comes back. It comes back in the form of "tiny snips of black whiskers," like the "black seeds" that started the growth of the speaker into a man. All the details show how the speaker looked up to his father back when he was young, when he was eager to learn about new things in life, about the changes of his body. He loved the father's beard so much that he even thought "it was his beard [the speaker] took the blade to" as he is shaving. Yet, that face "never taught [him] how to shave." It is one single line that reveals how the speaker's love and care for the father was not reciprocated, that moment of realization that all this time he was learning about life by his own. In one morning, while shaving, the speaker sees, and feels, a reminder that explains why the father's life passed him by quietly: it is because the lack of care and guidance from the father that makes the speaker growing up in independence, yet in solitude. 

The act of shaving, for the speaker, is more than just that. It is a moment for him to think about what has happened in his life, or to his life. Hence he was "not shaving," he was "writing" a story, he was "tell[ing] about the mornings," because the act of shaving has filled his mind with thoughts that have bothered him since forever. The father is no longer there with him, and this reality drives the speaker insane, to a point when "eyes don't recognize themselves," and the "mirror echoed with a hundred faces." A mirror does not reflect a hundred faces, that is a fact; it appears that the speaker might have seen the "hundred faces" due to how his view of the mirror is altered, by his tears, hence why his eyes could not recognize themselves. It is in that one morning when he is shaving, that he realizes how his father has left him in silence, how he never taught him how to grow up, and all this time he is learning everything by his own, a silent labor, that results in this moment when he could no longer hold the heavy burden, the heavy emotions that he has kept, in the form of his beard. But he has learned to accept it. And that is why he is right here, with "a full beard and the blade in [his] hand," and ready to "shave" away his unfortunate childhood. He has learned to accept that his father would never be there to teach him. He has understood the "invisibility of life," the "intensity of vanishing," how the father has left "without a trace." The rhyme and parallelism at the end highlight how the way the speaker sees his life, and the world, has changed. It is the nature of life, and one has to learn to accept the loss, and the unfortune, in their life.

To conclude, Blanco has illustrated the complexity of the act of shaving to convey a powerful message about growing up and accepting loss, with the utilization of effective literary elements.