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She's Leaving Home Poem Analysis

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She’s Leaving Home is a poem that exemplifies the separation of two generations.
The poem, told by a third person narrator, is about a girl who decides to run away from home. The girl’s parents are heartbroken as they believe that they gave their daughter everything she needed. However, the narrator reveals that the girl is actually happier away from home as the girl needed to break free from her parent’s control. The author demonstrates this opinion by utilizing a refrain, juxtaposition, and irony while trying to speak to his target audience: teenagers. The first poetic device fairly obvious to a reader is the repeated refrain throughout the poem. The actual significance of the refrain is that the daughter must leave home as she can no …show more content…

In this stanza the parents awake to find their daughter missing and her explaining why she left. The parents are at first are devastated that their “baby’s gone” and that the girl would “treat us so thoughtlessly.” The mother continues questioning how the girl could leave her and break her heart. The significance of this is that in the refrain that follows the parents interject the narrator by saying “We never thought of ourselves; Never a thought for ourselves.” The irony is that the parents state they only thought of their child giving her what she needed; yet the parents’ first thoughts are how can our daughter betray us instead of where is my daughter? The author uses this to portray how closed-minded parents are. At the beginning the daughter left a note explaining why she was leaving, yet in the third and fourth stanza the parents read the note and still believe the girl was ungrateful. However, in the fifth stanza the narrator tells the audience that the girl left home to make a life for herself as she is “meeting a man from the motor trade” or in other words getting a job. It is reasonable to infer that the daughter mentioned this opportunity in the note, and assuming she did, the parents are still against her leaving as they believe parents know best for their children. For this reason the author is trying to tell the audience of teens to say “bye bye” and break

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