To A Daughter Leaving Home

In Linda Pastan’s poem, “To a Daughter Leaving Home,” home is a place of reflection. When someone is making a departure from the home, in this case, the daughter leaving home, as noted in the title, it is a time for the mother to reflect on the memories that have been made thus far. The speaker in this poem, a mother, is reminiscing about the time she taught her daughter to ride a bicycle. This was an earlier memory of the daughter departing from home. Leaving home brings out many different emotions for the person leaving and the people that are being left behind. Pastan’s, “To a Daughter Leaving Home,” relies on word choice, elapse in time, and sentence structure to create a nostalgic memory.

The focus of this poem is on what is important to this family’s life. The mother’s memory takes her back to a park where her daughter first learned to ride a bicycle. We, as the reader, know nothing of the home her daughter is preparing to leave. The reader does not know if the mother and daughter lived in a mansion or a trailer, but that is not important to this story. The mother

The entire poem is composed entirely of one sentence. The poem opens with a capital “When” (1), and it ends with a period after “goodbye” (24), the only other punctuation is a few commons sprinkled throughout the piece. The poem creates a sentimental reflection through the use of a long sentence. In this poem, the mother is remembering the first time her daughter ever rode a bicycle. Riding a bicycle for the first time can be viewed as sentimental because the child no longer needs something else such as training wheels or someone else to lean on for help. Pastan creates a nostalgic feeling for the mother, as she watches her daughter do something by herself for the first time, meaning the daughter no longer needs her help. The long single sentence creates the flow of the reflection resulting in a sentimental