Explication of Ethics by Linda Pastan

     The poem Ethics by Linda Pastan features one narrator telling the story of her ethics class and a specific question that was asked which seemed to challenge the narrator's moral compass. There is a stream-of-consciousness-like aspect to this poem as we are hearing the narrator's continual thoughts. There is a narrative structure as the woman telling the story is almost giving a flashback as a young child in the beginning of the poem, and later returns to the present as an elderly lady. Each year in this ethics class, she would go back and forth with her answers half-heartedly as she claims, and as a reader, I noticed the change in maturity with her answers throughout the years.
     There is beautiful imagery beginning in line 19, describing the Rembrandt poem that the narrator has the opportunity to see many years later, "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". The way the poet compares the colors of the painting to different seasons of the year was very interesting to me and created an element of conceit.
     As an old woman viewing a Rembrandt painting, she contemplates the question she had once debated with many years prior as a child. She realizes that as a child, if there happened to be a fire in a museum, she would have probably been incapable of saving either the old woman or the painting anyways. There is an element of irony and somewhat comedy in this revelation. This raises a common moral issue of value. What is more valuable? A possession or a life?