Explication of "To A Daughter Leaving Home"

The poem "To a Daughter Leaving Home" was written by Linda Patan and the speaker is the mother of a daughter who is leaving home. There is a discrepancy between the title and the rest of the poem because the poem is talking about a young child learning to ride a bike yet the title tells us that the during the poem that speaker is reminiscing on times when her daughter was younger because now she is grown up and going to leave her to become independent.

In the poem, the mother recounts a time when her child still needed her and depended on her. Her daughter needed her to teach her how to ride a bike and to save her if anything went wrong in the process. The mother describes how she kept waiting for her daughter to fall off her bike so that she come and help. However, the daughter never fell, she just kept getting smaller and smaller in the distance, harder for the mother to catch up to. Now the daughter is leaving home and the mother will not always be there to help her or pick her up when something goes wrong and the mother feels as if she will be so far away.

The writer creates a metaphor between the daughter learning how to ride a bike and the daughter moving away from home, presumably to go to college. At the beginning of both processes the young girl needed to lean on her mother for support and aid. Eventually the girl learns how to ride own her own just like eventually the girl will learn to live on her own. As the girl becomes more independent the mother feels her slip away, just as she cannot catch up to her daughter on the bike and she sees her shrinking in the distance. The last few lines make it evident that the daughter is leaving home she describes her hair whipping in the wind as "waving goodbye". As well as a strong message and symbolic meaning, the poem also has a strong rhythm throughout which shows the talent of the writer.