Rearview Mirror - Robert Shaw

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IN THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR By Robert Shaw Losing sight of childhood dreams and memories is an integral part of becoming an adult, as one leaves his parents and family to experience the world independently. Robert Shaw’s poem “In the Rear-View Mirror” dramatizes the conflict between the theme of adulthood achieved through experience and the longing and regret one can feel as he grows up. He makes ample use of figurative and literal images of mirrors throughout the poem and introduces the notions of size a distance to create a linear perspective in the reader’s mind, thus producing an effective reflection on the common experience of a man leaving his loved ones. The setting of this poem is in a car, in which the speaker is driving away as his family waves him goodbye. While the latter looks into his rear-view mirror, he compares the growing distance between himself and his loved ones to his own growth as he progresses through life. This also symbolises the expanding chronology in which the poem takes place. The speaker notes that the people waving goodbye “diminish” with the “growing speed and distance”, just as his memory of them is slowly fading. As they gradually begin to resemble “nameless people on a postcard”, Shaw proceeds to express the speaker’s remorse regarding passed opportunities, as he associates these lost opportunities with exits on a highway: “following exits you will pass and never take”. He concludes his poem by stating the importance of memory when he correlates it to the rear-view mirror, “a higher-powered reflective instrument”. The author’s literary technique here is to convey a memory within the reader, therefore explaining his repetitive use of the second person, directly addressing the reader. Indeed, as an adult, one usually vividly remembers the day he had to move out of his parent’s home and finally begin to live on his own. Although,

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