"To a Daughter Leaving Home" Linda Pastan

Poet Linda Pastan was raised in New York City but has lived for most of her life in Potomac, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. In her senior year at Radcliffe College, Pastan won the Mademoisellepoetry prize (Sylvia Plath was the runner-up). Immediately following graduation, however, she decided to give up writing poetry in order to concentrate on raising her family. After ten years at home, her husband urged her to return to poetry. Since the early 1970s, Pastan has produced quiet lyrics that focus on themes like marriage, parenting, and grief. She is interested in the anxieties that exist under the surface of everyday life. (www.poetryfoundation.org)

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

In "To a Daughter Leaving Home," Pastan's metaphor of a mother watching her daughter learn to ride a bicycle for the first time is best understood in context of situation and setting, both relatable to a high school audience and many others. While narrating a childlike and playful experience (however stressful it may be for the mother), the speaker and mother's sentiment foreshadow and represent the same anxieties and fears she'll feel when her daughter leaves the house to live on her own, just as the daughter experiences a new found sense of freedom and independence on the bike, and will experience those same feelings in the future. The contrast between the past and the present found in this poem can be understood by almost any reader and therefore the situation and setting are more easily appreciated. We've all experienced a situation similar to the one described in the poem. Learning to ride a bike for the first time is a big, and often unforgettable experience in a child's life, not to mention the parent's. The anxiety felt by the mother as "[she] kept waiting for the thud of [the child's] crash as [she] sprinted to catch up." The relatability of this account is ultimately the factor that allows readers to comprehend the mother's dread and fear as her daughter leaves to create a life for herself. Not only does the mother's protective instinct relate the account to readers, but the setting creates a familiar backdrop for a somewhat hefty metaphor. Many can call upon memories of those "two round wheels" that "lop[ed] beside us" and our "hair flapping behind [us] like a handkerchief waving goodbye." This setting creates a familiarity that coexists with something that is in the high schooler's imminent future. Pastan uses the familiar setting and situation to use a simple instance to represent an emotional change in life that most will or have experience[d].