ETHICS
LINDA PASTAN
THE AUTHOR
• She was born to Jewish parents on 27th May 1932 in New York
• She is known for her short poems that address topics such as
domestic family life, motherhood, being a female, death, etc
• Ethics was published in early 1980’s during an economic upturn
in the United States economy after two decades of civil unrest
and uncertain position in the global market. It is no accident
that this drives the ethical question posed.
THE TITLE
• Ethics is a branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending
and recommending concepts of acceptable or unacceptable conduct or
behaviour.
• Ethical relativism holds that morality is relative to culture, place and time.
• This poem compares the value of human life to an art piece. The choice I
heard is between your mother and your wife.
THE POEM - ETHICS
• In ethics class so many years ago
our teacher asked this question every fall:
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? Restless on hard chairs
caring little for pictures or old age
we’d opt one year for life, the next for art
and always half-heartedly. Sometimes
the woman borrowed my grandmother’s face
leaving her usual kitchen to wander
some drafty, half-imagined museum.
THE POEM
One year, feeling clever, I replied
why not let the woman decide herself?
Linda, the teacher would report, eschews
the burdens of responsibility.
This fall in a real museum I stand
before a real Rembrandt, old woman,
or nearly so, myself. The colors
within this frame are darker than autumn,
darker even than winter — the browns of earth,
though earth’s most radiant elements burn
through the canvas. I know now that woman
and painting and season are almost one
and all beyond the saving of children.
SUMMARY
• The poem begins with an imaginary situation and ends with a real-
life situation.
• In the beginning, young children are burdened with a difficult
situation of choosing to save either an old woman nearing her death
or a Rembrandt painting in a fire at a museum.
• Their decision or choice could be right or wrong, just or unjust,
morally upright or not.
• At a point, the children choose to save the old woman because she
has the borrowed face of their grandmother.
• At the end of the poem, we realise that decisions and choices in
real-life are based on knowledge and experience.
THEMES
• Ethics: The poem looks at ethics in a hypothetical and in a real situation.
Ethical decisions are based on practical knowledge. The poem thus
refuses to judge the choices because it takes knowledge and experience
(maturity) to make ethical choices.
• Art and Experience: The poem pits the value of a piece of painting with
the value of human life.
• The sense of responsibility (childhood against adulthood): The children
approach the question half-heartedly without understanding its
significance. The poem is about the one who takes responsibility. The
teacher was probably teaching the students to take responsibility.
TECHNICAL DEVICES
• The poem is a short narrative poem, a monologue of twenty-five lines written in free
verse.
• The fire is presented as a symbol of destruction. The painting and the life of the old
woman are at stake and the fire presents an urgent situation of saving one or the
other.
• The image of the old woman with the borrowed face of a grandmother. In the mind’s
eye of the children, they cannot fathom leaving behind their old grandmother
• The image of restless children who cannot be burdened with choice and
responsibility. Thus, they answer the question half-heartedly.
TECHNICAL DEVICES
• Two seasons are mentioned in the poem: fall or autumn and
winter. These two are associated with gradual deterioration of the
human qualities and death. The colour is darker than autumn and
winter.
• Characters: The teacher probably tries to teach the children
responsibility. Linda who eschews responsibility has to finally face
the moment of choice.
• Setting: The poem is set first in a classroom and secondly in a
museum.
• Contrast: Linda the speaker as a child and as an adult. The class
and the museum. The hypothetical and the real.
