To a Daughter Leaving Home

Linda Pastan’s “To a Daughter Leaving Home” fits into the American, late Modern poetic canon in its subject matter, its style, and its voice. In this free verse personal narrative, Pastan relies on subtle instances of near rhyme, consonance, and assonance, along with a generally consistent line length, to provide a loose structure for the poem. Enjambed lines move the poem along quickly and in an informal, conversational rhythm. A cluster of related metaphors and meaningful wordplay elevate the deceptively simple diction, making the narrative both emotionally resonant and intellectually engaging.

The title itself suggests an intimate audience of one, like a letter. But the letter is addressed to “a daughter,” suggesting this experience, while specific to the poet, dramatizes a more universal transaction between mothers and daughters. Opening lines set the context for the scene, almost like a snapshot from the young woman’s early life in its precision: the beginning lines “When I taught you / at eight…” (Lines 1-2) establish the characters in this narrative, as well as their exact location in time. Nearly the first half of the poem is a dependent clause (Lines 1-10), and only in Line 11 out of 24 does the subject and verb—“I kept waiting” (Line 11)—show us the core action of this one long sentence full of animated motion, a mother’s attendance to her child. In the present instance of departure, she waits as well, knowing it is a mother’s role to witness and to be ready, but not to interfere.

The speaker’s diction reveals a parent’s range of conflicting emotions as she considers the imminent separation from her grown child: Dual meanings throughout the text show her shifts from fear to anticipation, and ultimately joy. At times the line breaks themselves heighten the uncertainty, as we wait to find out the mother’s mouth is “rounding / in surprise” (Lines 7-8), not terror, that the daughter “pulled / ahead” (Lines 8-9), not away or to the ground. The “pumping” in Line 18 describes the girl’s legs propelling the bicycle, but also the hearts of both parent and child in excitement and anticipation. “Screaming / with laughter” (Lines 19-20) shows the final shift in tone as the young woman finds her power and the speaker steps back with acceptance and vicarious glee, demonstrated in the final metaphor, the antiquated, formal gesture of a waving handkerchief (Line 23). The multilayered language not only suggests mixed emotions, but also reminds us that we can’t know how our stories will end. Like the speaker of the poem, we must wait to find out what will happen before we can interpret all of the language in any situation. As events unfold, our interpretation of words changes based on our new context.

The poem uses a physical metaphor to illustrate the struggle for freedom and mastery. Its grammatical structure—one long periodic sentence—mimics the breathlessness of the speaker, the mother, running alongside her daughter pedaling her bicycle in her memory, but the pace also mirrors the outpouring of feeling as the speaker unfolds her mixed emotions at the daughter’s later departure. Unexpected line breaks further the sense of her interrupted speech as the mother gasps for breath; they also imitate the girl’s initial unsteadiness as a new rider.

The verb tense, past in the opening lines, shifts to present, ending with a cluster of active participles in the closing lines as the mother gives in to an ecstatic celebration of her daughter’s strength and power. Verb tense shifts not only to move us into the immediacy of the narrative memory, but also to show a transfer of power between the women. The daughter “wobbled away” (Line 5) while her mother was “loping along” (Line 3), but by Line 14, it’s the mother who is in past tense (“sprinted”). As the daughter moves past her mother into the distance, she moves into the present as well, “pumping / for your life” (Lines 18-19), taking control not only of the bicycle and her physical direction, but moving into her future as an independent adult.

Part of the poem’s meaning requires attention to the parts of this scene left out of the narrative. The poem’s speaker—the mother—chooses to tell this particular story as her adult daughter leaves in order to remind her daughter this time that she will be behind her to offer support and concern, even if she becomes too distracted with the life she will be living “with distance,” “more breakable” because she will be out of reach (Line 17). The speaker does not scold or admonish the daughter; the progression happens in its right order. The point all along, as with the bicycle lesson, was to give her the means to leave. The speaker seems only to ask the daughter to remember. First, she asks her to remember the story of the bicycle lesson along with her. Less directly, she asks her to remember that she has a mother who “kept waiting,” who still waits, vigilant, for the time she may be needed (Line 11). The speaker tells the side of the bicycle lesson the daughter could not have known when she was eight years old: her mother’s perspective. The poem is the speaker’s plea for empathy in the present by means of describing her experience in the past.