Subject of a poem by linda pastan?

Question

What is the subject of the poem ethics by linda pastan? Also, what is the theme? What point does it make about art, life, time, and values?

Any advice would be great, thanks.

Answer 1

Historical Context

"Ethics" was published in the early 1980s, when the U.S. economy experienced a decided upturn after two decades of civil unrest and an uncertain position in the global market. Perhaps it is no accident that an economics of worth is what drives the poem's ethical question, "which would you save, a Rembrandt painting / or an old woman who hadn't many years left anyhow?" When Republican Ronald Reagan became President in 1980, the country was ripe for economic reform. The former actor's plan, later dubbed "Reaganomics," involved drastic cuts in taxes and social spending, and resulted for a while in steep declines in interest and inflation rates, and the appearance of millions of new jobs.

Ethics” is written in the form called “free verse,” which depends on images and the natural rhythms of speech for its expression, not on meter or rhyme. Many modern and contemporary American poets in the last two centuries have written in free verse, revealing the range of its powers in the relative absence of “formal” patterns. Walt Whitman, for example, drew upon the “music” inherent in free verse, Robert Frost explored its capacity for drama, and William Carlos Williams explored the power of the image to provide meaning and design.

Besides being a memoir and a reflection on art, this poem is the story of its title, “Ethics,” in the life of one woman. It not only tells a story about the passage from youth to old age, but also about a maturing morality that perceives the unity among all things and takes responsibility for the “real.” To put it in the language of the poem, it is about making the passage from "half-hearted" and "half imagined" to an ethical landscape that has features that are "almost one."

At the beginning of the poem, the poet-speaker and her classmates are equipped with partial knowledge, producing their "half-hearted" response. The typical strategy of a philosophy teacher is to introduce students to a variety of moral theories and posit situations that test their implications.

Pastan writes about people—their bodies and their minds—and because of the nature of her cen-teredness, she offers less for critics to talk about; these poems are more readily accessible to the reader. Pastan is "accessible" because she writes about people going about their "dailiness," a subject that is presumably uninteresting to the average critic.