Ethics By Linda Pastan

Linda Pastan via “Ethics” explores the importance of experience and leads the reader through a psychological journey with an overlaying philosophical question: “If there were a fire in a museum / which would you save, a Rembrandt painting / or an old woman who hadn’t many / years left anyhow?” (3-6) Pastan brilliantly structures her poem to alter the central question so that it appears more difficult to answer. By leaving "a Rembrandt painting" at the end of line 4 and "years left anyhow" at line 6, Pastan accentuates the significance of one option while devaluating the other. Since Pastan weighs the nonhuman option more heavily than the human option, even though it may seem obvious to value human life over a painting, the reader might struggle with what could otherwise be a very straightforward question. When the speaker's teacher explains that the answerer of the question is exclusively accountable for the fate of both the woman and the painting, she brings "the burdens of responsibility" onto a separate line, making those burdens present and more pretentious (16). This line break makes the responsibility starker, invoking the enormous pressure felt by someone entrusted with the decision to save or end someone's life. These breaks of thought convey a sense of doubt and uncertainty, downplaying the narrator`s level of contemplation and
The selection of words near the beginning such as ”drafty," "half-heartedly," and "half-imagined" give the reader the idea of how weakly the children understood and perceived the predicament, thus adding to the idea that the children cannot understand the burden the speaker has upon herself (6). Later in the poem, Pastan's language becomes multifarious; for example, she uses more commas to separate fragments of thought within the same sentence. The central question, however, remains as difficult despite the speaker's increased