To A Daughter Leaving Home

Poets typically write about their own emotional experiences close to themselves. Whether it be a family member dying or about their wedding day or their child leaving, poets often reflect about their own memories. The poets purpose to get the reader to feels the emotions they feel while writing the poem, and allow the reader to connect with their poem. In this poem, Pastan explores the feelings of a parent’s passion and happiness but also sadness of one's child growing up.
The poem “To a Daughter Leaving Home”, by Linda Pastan is a very emotional poem, you can assume that the poem is about their child leaving home. You can assume that the voice in this poem is a parent that is seeking to share their special time with their child, and how easily it can be lost. In
the poem that special time shared with the eight year old child was the parent teaching the child how to ride a bike. This poem’s deeper story is about the life of the child and how quick the daughter’s life went by until they say goodbye.The poetic devices used help translate this story into the actual message.
The parent is helping the daughter learn how to ride a bike by standing beside her as she rides her bicycle, and the daughter “wobbled away”. This example of imagery, showing an image of the daughter that is not fully in control of how she is controlling the bicycle. As she goes on her own the parent is surprised to see that the daughter has gone down a “curved path of the park”. The poet has used “curved path” as a symbol to represent life. Linda Pastan has used a “curved path” as a symbol to show how life as a fun, dangerous and unpredictable path, that doesn’t go in one straight line . “I kept waiting for a thud of crash” this line tells us that the parent is panicked about the daughter getting hurt. The parent goes running after the daughter. The “Smaller, more breakable” daughter; the author is trying to explain how the child is fragile, in the parents eyes. Also, the daughter is not in reach with the parent. However, the child still continues to go independently on her bicycle “pumping, pumping”. She continues on with her life “screaming with laughter”. This makes the parent feel as if they are the
only one that believes that her daughter is in danger, because she is on a bicycle that she knows how to ride and she can easily fall and hurt her self. The deeper meaning behind the poem is that as the child gets old she is going through her life without her parent independently. However the parent believes she needs to help their child through life because it is dangerous and risky, but to the daughter it was only a joy. The daughter goes on with life without the parents help. The daughter goes with “the hair flapping” which the parents believe to be a “handkerchief” waving “goodbye” to them. The simile “the hair flapping like a handkerchief” ties the poem together, showing the parent is sad that their daughter is waving goodbye, and no longer need their help. The mood this creates is very emotional. It is very tragic that the parent had to say goodbye when the parent was not ready to let their child go.
This poem is addressed to “a Daughter Leaving Home” and the poem is written to make the daughters that are leaving their homes, reflect upon their own lives, how they have gone through them and how they have kept in touch with their parents. The emotion that are conveyed in this poem, are sadness and shocked of the parents letting go their child. Patsan shares her own story of her child leaving in order to convey these emotions.