"To a Daughter Leaving Home"

"To a Daughter Leaving Home" by Linda Pastan

Linda Pastan was born in New York in 1932. She is an American poet of Jewish background. She is a mother of three, one of her children being a novelist. Pastan was the Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995 and has won several other awards throughout her career. Most of her poems are based on family life and motherhood. "To a Daughter Leaving Home" is about a mother watching her child learn how to ride a bike. The setting of this poem is not clearly defined other than it being in the past which is portrayed by the speaker's nostalgic tone. The situation is the most important part of the poem. The speaker of this poem is the mother. She is recalling the event of teaching her daughter how to ride a bike. The mother is looking back on this memory because according to the title of this poem, her daughter is grown and is leaving home. The story of her daughter learning how to ride a bike is significant to the mother because at that moment, she experienced a small taste of what it would really be like when her daughter grows up and leaves home. Now that it is actually time for her daughter to leave home, she is looking back at this memory and trying to remember what it felt like to see her go. The last line of the poem contains only one word and this word is "goodbye". Ending with this word adds to the significance of the poem's situation because it portrays that the mother now has to say goodbye to her daughter and let her move on to adult life.