31 pages • 1 hour read
To a Daughter Leaving Home
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Themes
The Emotional Terrain of Family Relationships
Linda Pastan’s poems often depict narratives of familial relationships in day-to-day circumstances, as seen here in “To a Daughter Leaving Home”. Chronological time doesn’t inhibit connections in her works; Pastan’s ancestors can be as present as her immediate family, and memories like the vignette in this poem are as full of sensory detail as a present-tense narrative. In Pastan’s world, familial bonds cross time and space, and relatives of all kinds provide a lens through which the self can be viewed. In this poem, the speaker experiences a vicarious thrill in her daughter’s freedom, but also a hint of mortality in the realization that her support is no longer needed. The poem itself and its message, addressed directly to the daughter, represent the speaker’s relinquishing of at least part of her parental role. In using her own immediate and distant family members as subjects for poetry, Pastan does not aim to create autobiographical works; rather, the topic becomes family itself, the arc of relationships, the significance of generational wisdom and heritage, the support and care given out of love and duty. Like Pastan’s domestic settings, the frequent topic of family in her work provides a universal connection to readers. While individual situations inevitably differ, most all readers recognize the emotional terrain of family relationships. Pastan’s work diverges from many Modern and Contemporary poets in that her poems depict the everyday interactions with family, not the moments of crisis or failure. The mother and daughter in “To a Daughter Leaving Home” know that peril remains close, both in the past and present, but the events of the poem both take place in moments of hope and new beginning.
Defining Human Restlessness Through Motion
Throughout Pastan’s poetry, the theme of movement—physical movement, intellectual agility, the movement of time—illustrates human restlessness. This poem’s narrative uses physical movement as its central metaphor for self-reliance, the young girl riding her bicycle away from her mother. One motion leads to another, as the girl’s separation from her mother’s guidance prompts the motion of her mother’s mouth in surprise (Lines 7-9). The mother’s breathless efforts to catch up result from her daughter’s diminished physical presence in the distance. The poem ends in an image of ongoing movement, the girl’s hair waving in the distance (Lines 21-24). The line breaks suggest awkward, downward-dropping movement as substantive pairs of words are separated, giving the poem a limping cadence. In terms of diction, this short poem manages to use a word that describes some kind of deliberate movement in nearly all 26 lines: ride, loping, wobbled, pulled ahead, curved, sprinted, catch up, pumping, flapping, and more. Even the visual shape of the lines on the page represents the undulating movement: the path of the rider and the parabolic trajectory of memory and experience. In a thematic instance of wordplay, “moving day” provides the occasion of the poem itself, addressed to the grown girl in the title as she is leaving home.
The Omnipresence of Mortality and Loss
Many of Pastan’s poems address the omnipresence of death in daily life, exhibited not only in terminal loss of life, but also in the grief spurred by inevitable changes of all kinds. “To a Daughter Leaving Home” translates one kind of loss into another as a mother recalls the pang of grief and fear she felt watching her daughter ride away from her, becoming “smaller, more breakable” (Line 16). The speaker, wise to the ways of the world, waits for disaster, or “the thud / of your crash” (Lines 12-13), with a wry awareness. While the poem yields to happiness in the girl’s success, even those euphoric descriptions are couched in potential disaster: “pumping / for your life” (Lines 18-19) suggests failure might be fatal, and “screaming” in Line 19 gestures at real terror before relief at “laughter” in Line 20. This poem commemorating a daughter’s departure from her mother’s home ends on the bittersweet “goodbye” (Line 24), the hardest word for the speaker to say left to the last line, where it takes its place alone.
Time, History, and Memory
Throughout her work, Pastan questions the limits of linear time. Whether it’s by translating a classical narrative into the world of contemporary sensibilities or by describing her own ancestor’s village as he would have seen it, Pastan defines and rewrites chronology, giving the past an elasticity that allows for scrutiny and sentiment. These interludes of minutiae offer the reader a sensible history, a sense of immediacy and witness that a journalistic account could not achieve. They also suggest a philosophical concept of time that is cyclical, rather than linear. This circular sense of history may be another of Pastan’s adaptations from an earlier world; the ancient Hebrew concept of time as a series of circles corresponds with Pastan’s narratives that span eras. In “To a Daughter Leaving Home”, circular patterns, the “cycle” ridden by the girl, and the parallel stories in the past and present all point to the idea that our stories repeat across time, that change comes when the time arrives.
In “To a Daughter Leaving Home”, Pastan tells her daughter, all daughters, and the reader a story that happened before and will happen again. The central moment of the poem—waiting for the crash—represents the way all of us wait for the crashes we know can happen at any time (Lines 11-13). We experience the joy and beauty of life, its most poignant moments, knowing that disaster may be closing in on us. But even when the disasters arrive, including the greatest disasters of history that Pastan confronts in other poems, we know those times will pass away. For the speakers of Pastan’s poems, the true understanding of the intimacy and singularity of personal experience comes through knowing that others have felt the same things before us and will again after us. The “goodbye” (Line 24) in the final line of “To a Daughter Leaving Home” is only one goodbye in the lifetime of her relationship with her mother. The occasion of the poem is another goodbye. There will be a final goodbye for this mother and child. But mothers, children, and all kinds of loved ones have said countless goodbyes before us and will say them after us. Pastan offers us consolation in this continuity and thus stands apart as a contemporary writer who values the ubiquity of experience over the uniquely personal.
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By Linda Pastan
