To a Daughter Leaving Home

“To a Daughter Leaving Home” is a contemporary poem by American poet Linda Pastan, from her 1988 collection The Imperfect Paradise. The poem features themes prominent in Pastan’s work: family relationships, the changing role women in the modern world, and the small daily reminders of eventual change and loss. The poem demonstrates Pastan’s style of conveying complex emotional states through direct language and simple diction. Like many of Pastan’s speakers, the mother in this poem communicates simultaneously in the present, as her daughter moves away from home, and in the past, as she recalls teaching her then-eight-year-old daughter to ride a bicycle. Throughout Pastan’s work, the past illuminates the present, whether it takes the form of personal nostalgia, ancestral memory, or collective cultural history.

Poet Biography

Linda Pastan was born in New York City in 1932, the only child of Jacob and Bess Olenik. In a career of over 50 years, Pastan has won the Dylan Thomas Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Ruth Lily Prize. Her books PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (1992) and Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 (1998) were finalists for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and she served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991-1995. She lives in the Potomac region of Maryland near Washington, D.C.

Pastan grew up in the Bronx, urged by her doctor father to pursue a career in medicine. She read widely and began writing at an early age, sending poems to The New Yorker before she had even entered high school. Her mother relished the role of doctor’s wife; her deep satisfaction with domestic life affected not only the trajectory of Pastan’s personal life, but also the central themes of her work. By the time Pastan graduated from Radcliffe in 1954, she was already married. A doctor’s wife like her mother, Pastan put thoughts of a literary career on hold to raise her family. With help from her husband, Pastan eventually began to take time away from household duties in order to write each morning, beginning a consistent daily writing practice Pastan maintained for decades.

In her first book, A Perfect Circle of Sun (1971), Pastan’s consistent themes of domestic situations, family, and the cycles of life feature prominently. Pastan chose not to pursue an academic career, focusing her creative energy on writing rather than teaching. Some critics have at times dismissed her work as simple and unambitious in scope, though others praise her ability to derive inspiration from nearly any situation. Throughout her 15 books, Pastan’s identity as a wife and mother shapes the scope and tone of the poems, while topics range from the invisible and unpoetic stuff of daily life (answering machines, pincushions, grocery lists) to the most grave and universal (the Holocaust, cancer treatment, the fundamental human urge to communicate). In the most mundane and overlooked images of every day, Pastan finds a place of grace.

Born the same year as Sylvia Plath, Pastan won the prestigious Mademoiselle Dylan Thomas Prize for Poetry the same year Plath was runner-up in the contest. This literary intersection makes for an illuminating footnote, underscoring the breadth of Pastan’s career. In over 50 years of publication, Pastan’s voice forms a consistent document of the nuances of American home and family life during the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st. Her poems show the domestic complications and anxiety at work beneath the world of modern convenience and slick advertising. They examine the promise of new freedom alongside the darkness of mortality and the warning voice of history. Her works describe the ever-renewing future without forgetting the wisdom of the past.

Poem Text

Pastan, Linda. “To a Daughter Leaving Home”. 1988. Library of Congress.

Summary

As her daughter prepares to move out into the world, a mother reminisces about her bicycle lesson years earlier. While teaching her child to ride a bicycle calls up anxiety and possible peril, this mother also celebrates the thrill of opening a new world of freedom for her daughter. The title sets the context—the daughter’s departure—while the text of the poem depicts the mother’s brief account of running alongside her daughter at the moment when she begins to ride on her own, moving ahead, becoming smaller in the distance as her mother watches with concern, interest, and excitement.