To a Daughter Leaving Home

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1998

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Mirrors

Pastan uses several kinds of mirroring and parallel structures throughout the poem. The narrative depicts the emotions around a turning point in the present state of this mother/daughter relationship by reflecting on another significant event from their past. In both situations, the daughter is moving away from her mother and into a wider world. The mother and daughter run parallel to one another at the poem’s start, the mother “loping along / beside […]” the daughter who soon gains the confidence to pull away (Lines 3-4). More parallels appear within the poem’s narrative, such as the round wheels of the bicycle replicated in the shape of the mother’s mouth “rounding / in surprise” (Lines 7-8). As part of a larger thematic context in Pastan’s work, mother/daughter relationships represent a kind of parallel and mirroring, as there is a transfer of familial experience and generational wisdom in the aspects of their identities they share between them.

Circles

The circle motif dominates “To a Daughter Leaving Home”, both in image and theme. The cycle of life constitutes the biggest circle of all, encompassing the entire narrative. The story the mother tells her daughter depicts repeated relationship arcs, but the theme extends beyond to the broader historical cycle of one generation giving way to the next. Visual circles recur throughout, including the wheels of yet another cycle, the one the daughter is learning to ride. The mother’s mouth becomes a circle, “rounding” in Line 7, as the daughter follows a “curved” path (Line 9). Diction in the final lines becomes recursive as a group of participles (“pumping,” “screaming,” “flapping,” “waving”) repeats with a rhythm imitating the cycle of wheels turning as the rider builds momentum (Lines 18, 19, 21, 23). Pastan’s poems often represent life as a series of cycles and returns, making these recurring images of orbits especially resonant within the poem and as part of her overall body of work.

The Human Body

Images of physical bodies in the poem appear in fragments and in miniature, representing both the daughter’s physical absence and the nature of memory itself. The poem’s occasion and narrative both concern the physical distancing that makes the daughter “more breakable” from the mother’s perspective (Line 16). The mother’s body accelerates to a sprint, struggling to catch up, even as she paradoxically “kept waiting” for disaster (“the thud / of your crash”) in the middle of the poem, embodying the jumble of thoughts the mother experiences in both the narrative and in her present situation (Lines 11-14). The wave goodbye in the final lines comes from the girl’s hair flying out behind her, as if her body takes over to perform this gesture intuitively while her hands guide the bicycle (Line 21). The synecdoche of “hair flapping” in Line 21 stands in for the girl herself as she disappears from the mother’s and from the reader’s view.