Read the following poem. What ethical dilemma does the poem present? Does the poem resolve this dilemma?

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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

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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

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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?

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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

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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

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and all beyond saving by children.

How would you resolve the ethical dilemma that Pastan presents in her poem? Write a paragraph or two in which you discuss the dilemma as well as the ethical principle on which you based your conclusion.