Analysis Of Ethics By Linda Pastan

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In "Ethics," a poem by Linda Pastan, the speaker talks about a moral question that her Ethics teacher would ask every fall, which has remained in her thoughts for a long time. The question was "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). and the speaker tells us that ethics and moral values can only be learned from the reflection which comes through experience and maturity. The speaker uses some literary elements to support her theme which are: diction, figures of speech and imagery. The author develops her theme through word choice. For example, the words like "drafty," "half-heartedly," and "half-imagined" an idea of how weakly the dilemma was perceived by the children, supporting the idea that the children cannot understand the problem the speaker has. Also, when the speaker refers to Rembrandt as just a "picture" and to the woman as "old age," we can see that these two symbols are considered trivial by the children, even though they are very important to both the speaker and the p...

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