Situation/Setting Poem 1: To a Daughter Leaving Home

"To a Daughter Leaving Home"

-Linda Pastan

I honestly found this poem to be very touching. I found the language to be very sweet, sad yet happy. The mother was sad to see her daughter become "smaller...with distance" but happy to see that she was learning how to ride her bike. The situation of this poem is simply the title, "a daughter leaving home". The speaker is the mother and her perspective changes from that of an aid to more of a bystander. While the poem has no solid setting (ie. time, place, etc.), it does take place in the distant past. Thusly, the entire poem becomes the situation. The author uses her entire work as a means to describe this one memory. She uses no space whatsoever to discuss the characters, their current situation, or even the setting. The only clue is the title, this gives us some insight as to the families current situation, which allows us to connect it to the past situation described in the poem in order to draw meaning. This meaning, the effect of departure on a mother, is especially significant because the characters are mother-daughter. This enhances the connection that is being broken as the daughter rides away from her "wobbled" start to her unforeseeable endpoint.