Analysis Of Daughter Leaving Home By Linda Pastan

From the first-time read through, the poem gives a basic understanding of the narrative: a daughter telling the audience about her mother’s struggles

As we get older we tend to reflect more on our life and get our priorities together. We tend to realize who and what is important, the people who mean the most to us and the ones we can’t live without. Who would those significant individuals be for us? For most people it would be their parents. In the poems “My Father’s Song” by Simon J. Ortiz, and “My Mother” by Ellen Bryant Voigt, both writers express their emotion towards a parent. The poems are similar in many ways simply because they share a parent child relationship, they are also vastly different. “My Fathers Song” is a poem about a son who lost his father and is grieving and referring back to old memories, reflecting on their past and the wonderful time he had with his father. “My Mother” on the other hand is a poem about a daughter who lost her mother and is having a difficult time coping as she reflects on the decisions she made as a child and how that affected her relationship with her mother. Despite their differences, the two poems share a true connection of love towards their parent. Most notably “My Fathers Song” and “My Mother” differ in the relationship with their parent, the settings in which the memories they hold of their parents take place, and who they are mourning over, yet the two have a strong emphasis on love.

One of the most difficult, yet rewarding roles is that of a parent. The relationship between and parent and child is so complex and important that a parents relationship with her/his child can affect the relationship that the child has with his/her friends and lovers. A child will watch their parents and use them as role models and in turn project what the child has learned into all of the relationship that he child will have. The way a parent interacts with his/her child has a huge impact on the child’s social and emotional development. Such cases of parent and child relationships are presented in Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” and Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”. While Roethke and Plath both write about a dynamic between a child-father relationship that seems unhealthy and abusive, Plath writes about a complex and tense child-father relationship in which the child hates her father, whereas Roethke writes about a complex and more relaxed child-father relationship in which the son loves his father. Through the use of tone, rhyme, meter, and imagery, both poems illustrate different child-father relationships in which each child has a different set of feelings toward their father.

Pastan displays a parent remembering when his or her daughter was being taught to ride a bicycle in lines 1-10. They were guiding the bike while running next to the girl, when she started to pull away and ride for herself. This represents how throughout the first years of a girls’ life she is being guided by her mother or father, but when she reaches a certain age she is no longer in need of their help. In lines 11-17, the parent is nervously waiting for his or her daughter to crash, but the daughter is still peddling, getting faster and more dangerous as she rides along. In life as a girl grows up she starts to do things alone, and the parent feels like they are losing their daughter. This worries the parent who is no longer next to her to catch her if she falls. Then, in lines 18-24, the girl riding the bicycle is having a great time, and the parent knows that he or she is too far away to catch her fall. In “For a Daughter Leaving Home,” it shows the view of the girl from the perspective of the mother or father as she rides away in the lines that read, “the hair flapping / behind you like a / handkerchief waving / goodbye.” As

This poem is written from the point of view of a child at daycare and displays a child’s accepting love for his carer. As Lynn, the child’s carer, reads him stories and “smells good when she picks [him] up”, the child discovers his love for her (Lee 9). The child narrating the poem also states, “I guess I’m going to marry Lynn”, exhibiting his love for the person who takes care of him (18).Furthermore, the child’s interpretation of love is

The “The Leaving” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly is a poem that depicts a young girl whose actions are influenced by a challenge insinuated by her father. The girl competes with the physical limitations her father placed on her in order to prove her worth to him and to herself. She exclaims, “My father said I could not do it, but all night I

Everyone has a father. No matter if the father is present in a child’s life or not, he still exists and takes that role. A father has a major impact on his child whether he knows it or not, and that impact and example shapes the child’s perspective on life, and on love. The authors, Robert Hayden and Lucille Clifton, share the impact of their fathers through poetry, each with their own take on how their fathers treated them. The poems “Forgiving My Father” and “Those Winter Sundays” have significant differences in the speaker’s childhood experiences, the tone of the works, and the imagery presented, which all relate to the different themes of each poem.

Poetry is like a song without music, it has the ability to awaken your emotions and the ability to tell stories that can paint beautiful, relatable, imagery in the viewer’s mind. Upon reading the poem, “My Son the Man” by Sharon Olds, she presents a unique view on her bittersweet experience of watching her son gravitate towards manhood, “Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider” (line1), while realizing he is astute enough to escape his mother’s strong hold, “to learn the way out” (line 16). As a mother myself, I began to recognize how I can relate to the speaker’s challenges of understanding a child’s need to test limits and break free from dependency. I realized through the speaker’s obvious allusions to Houdini expressing the need to break free, the contrast used to convey the indirect references to Houdini, and the similes used to express emotion toward reflecting back on a time of innocence, accepting the need of a maturing child’s independence proves the strength of a mother’s love.

In the poem, “Mothers and daughters”, she writes about the relationship of mothers and daughters. The speaker of the poem is mother and she is describing mothers’ relationship with their daughters. In the beginning of the poem, she gives insight of mothers and daughters share love with each other. They have close bonding and have a perfect relationship. Later, the mother describes the dark side of their relationship where they have conflicts with each other. “Mothers and daughters” is the poem which illustrates the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters as they share love with each other, but they have conflicts too.

In the poem “To a Daughter Leaving Home” by Linda Pastan is filed with metaphors and symbols that represent the feeling of a child growing up and moving out onto their own. There comes a time when every parent must send off their child into the world, and these parents feel a multitude of things when sending them off. It paints a picture of a father teaching his young daughter to ride a bike, but uses this image to represent a child growing up. The mixed feeling of pride and fear as the child grows up and moves out of the nest. The use of first person past tense shows us that the narrator is recalling the time they taught their child to ride a bike and are reliving that experience with the child moving out again. The fright of watching your child speed down the road towards life is portrayed from the start and continues throughout the poem. A good parent is always worried about their child’s wellbeing; they will always worry as they watch their children head straight to the destruction that comes with living life. Though the good parent will try their best to teach their child how to ride their bike into adulthood. This poem uses imagery, word choice, and metaphor to express the fears a parent has when sending their child out on their own into the world.

Few relationships are as deep as those between child and parent. While circumstance and biology can shape the exact nature of the bond, a child’s caretaker is the first to introduce them to the world. And as they grow and begin to branch out, children look to their parents as a model for how to interact with the various new situations. Through allusion, potent imagery, and nostalgic diction, Natasha Trethewey constructs an idolized image of a father guiding their child through life’s challenges only to convey the speaker’s despair when they are faced with their father’s mortality in “Mythmaker.”

housewife. Few people consider being a wife and mother a full-time job in itself, and it is not

The poem "To a Daughter Leaving Home" by Linda Pastan captivates readers by having a significant metaphorical, and relatable theme. Linda Pastan writes about an eight year old girl learning how to ride her bike, "When I taught you/ at eight to ride/ a bicycle, loping along/ beside you" (1-4). The bicycle ride is a symbol of the journey of a child growing up, taking risks, and leaving home. The author uses an compelling amount of action verbs throughout the entirety of the poem, "pumping, pumping/ for your life, screaming/ with laughter" (18-20). The verbs help to create an emotional reaction from the reader.  The voice of this poem is the most powerful technique that the author has used to portray the theme; by speaking from a parental standpoint,

In the poem ‘Moon’, Kathleen Jamie explores themes of abandonment, loneliness and disconnection. She does this by utilizing a clearly dysfunctional relationship between a mother and child. The child replaces the either mentally or physically absent mother with the presence of the moon. To explore the emotional distance between child and mother, the author uses dark and light imagery to empathize the child’s loneliness and to evoke the scene of a parent visiting they child late at night. Personification of inanimate objects illustrates the detrimental effects the unavailable mother has on the child’s mental wellbeing. The poem ends with dialogue from the protagonist, the child, pointing out that the moon is not her mother, as if to be

The relationship between a parent and child is potentially one of the most influential in a child’s life. A positive interaction often yields admiration, love or a sense of support. A negative relationship may yield distrust, animosity or a sense of solitude. Theodore Roethke’s poem, “My Papa’s Waltz,” describes the admiration of his hardworking father. The speaker, a young boy, depicts roughhousing with his father in the form of a waltz; expressing his desire to stay up and spend more time together though their relationship is detached. Seamus Heaney’s “Digging,” instills a sense of respect, pride, and a slight affliction for the speaker’s choice of the pen over the spade. The speaker has chosen a different path in life than that of his father and grandfather. Although written at different stages in life, both Roethke and Heaney write a poem about their families utilizing vivid imagery to demonstrate the love and pride they felt for these men.