Linda Pastan's 1988 poem, "To a Girl Who Leaves Home", concerns the idea of ​​children growing up and leaving, whether it's for college or just riding a bike for the first time. The speaker of the poem begins with a nostalgic feeling, speaking to the child and remembering a time when the child was eight years old and learning to ride a bicycle. The speaker follows his daughter until it is difficult to follow and he can do nothing but stand and watch the child walk away. The title of the poem takes a deeper look at this seemingly simple bond that almost all parents and children have by relating it to the idea of ​​a child leaving home for a short time or permanently. The poem “To a Girl Who Leaves Home” talks about the theme of children who eventually are old enough to leave home, or their parents, and the difficulty of accepting them. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay The title of the poem, as well as the beginning, sets the scene with a nostalgic feeling of the speaker's child growing up. The first line, “When I taught you/at eight to ride a bike/to ride a bike,” immediately distinguishes the poem from the title (736). The title encapsulates the feeling of a child going off to college or living alone while the opening lines take the reader back to an earlier time. The first line also creates a strong relationship between the speaker and the girl, claiming the speaker as the teacher and the girl as someone who is being taught. The book "Poetry for Students" states that "the phrasing of this verse, isolating the pronouns of the two people and the mother's role as teacher, implies that the relationship between mother and daughter is a central concern of the poem ". The first line makes it clear that the reader is primarily addressing the girl, their relationship proving to be the main source of the poem itself. The title of the poem creates the idea that it is about an older child who is leaving for good, while the opening lines set a radically different scene in which the child is only eight years old, creating a nostalgia. The rest of the poem focuses on the idea of ​​not wanting to let the child go, but eventually doing so. Line 11 shows the speaker worrying that his daughter might crash and trying to run with her: "I kept waiting for/the thud/of your crash while I/sprinted to catch up" ( 737). The speaker clings to his child, hoping to protect him at all times, but struggles to keep up with the rapid pace at which the girl moves and moves away. The literary overview discusses this by focusing on the speaker's state in relation to the girls: "Line 11 returns attention to the narrator, who follows the description of the girl's physical activity by detailing his own emotional state , a state of anxiety about the success of the young girl's physical activity. my daughter will prove it by pedaling alone.” The speaker waits until the girl falls off the bike and hurts herself, until she needs her. The girl, on the other hand, accelerates and moves quickly, not realizing that her mother is following her. The speaker goes on to say that her daughter is getting "smaller, more brittle" as she continues to ride her bike alone in the park. The speaker watches her daughter walk away, becoming smaller in her vision and seemingly more fragile. At the end, the speaker compares her daughter's hair to a "handkerchief that says goodbye" signaling that the daughter has cycled away from the mother and created a physical distance between the two (737). The poem summarizes the struggle that the speaker and most parents have.