Poem analysis

Ethics by Linda Pastan (b. 1932)

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.

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.

Read the above poem and answer the prompt.

Prompt: In reading the above poem, a question is posed.  How does the author answer the question, and what is the author's purpose?  In answering the prompt, be sure to use your literary vocabulary to help you make your point.  

Seeing

     I am being given a room of my own.  It is by definition a room that is for me to do my work, to bring my passions to life, to be me.  This room comes replete with materials to be chosen by me in order to make this place my own.  In looking at the design of the room, I have to place the desk by the window. I am a day dreamer, but for me to write and think I need to see the world.  I enjoy watching how things move, how the trees change, how the birds maneuver, and how nature plays.  I haven't always been this way.  It is about mindfully choosing to watch.  To see.
     Annie Dillard writes in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that "seeing is of course very much  a matter of verbalization.  Unless I call attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it.  It is, as Ruskin says, 'Not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen'"(30).  To see this way is what allows us to understand how the world works and how we work within the world.  My children taught me this.  They would crouch down and study bugs that I had learned to step over.  They would watch as the trees moved and call attention to the birds.  My children taught me to slow down.
     For this week's blog, I want you to willfully see.  Go to a window.  Sit and watch.  You can pick your window and your subject.  (If you choose people, be respectful in that this is a public blog.)  Write down what you see.  Then, come up with a poem or descriptive prose passage that captures what you see.  What have you learned from watching this subject, and how can what you learn be applied to your life at the stage in which you currently reside?