Explication of "To Daughter Leaving Home"

In Linda Pastan's poem To a Daughter Leaving Home  a mother watches her eight year old child successfully ride a bike for the first time. The little girl begins out wobbly  on her two wheeled bike but eventually she is able to ride for an extended stretch of time.  Her parent awaits the moment when she must aid her daughter and she keeps up but eventually recognizes that her child is able to bike on her own. This instance is both a moment of sudden realization and a metaphor for the future to this narrator.  The unassisted bike ride makes the speaker realize that their daughter is able to exist on her own without constant help by her parent. The mother us shocked by this and thinks "my own mouth rounding / in surprise when you pulled / ahead down the curved / path of the park" (6-10). The speaker is concerned that the farther the bike goes the "smaller, more breakable" (16) the daughter becomes. The final line finds this scene to be a metaphor. It states: "hair flapping / behind you like a / handkerchief waving goodbye." (20-24). The notion that on a bike the child is able to exist on her own without constant help by her parent is also applicable to the child's life as she grows older. The title of the poem To a Daughter Leaving Home serves to label this poem as the metaphor for a parent's fear when their child moves away. The poem is written in run-on lines and creates the feel of a scene being shown or a story being taught. The first seven lines are chock full of assonance featuring the letter  "o" which provides the story with a singsongy childlike feel but this ends at line eight with assonance of "surprise" and "pulled" along with consonance of "p" and "d." This switch mirrors the change of action in that once the speaker was "loping along" next to her daughter but now her child has "pulled / ahead down the curved / path of the park" (9-10). The final part of the poem utilizes repetition to convey action. The daughter is "pumping" her pedals while "screaming with laughter while her hair is "flapping" and inadvertently "waving / goodbye" (18-24). The ing repetition gives the girl great action while it seems the mother is frozen by her sobering realization and motionless while her daughter moves forward.