English Essay

The poem “Education for Leisure” by Carol Ann Duffy expresses the attitude of a person who thinks that he is too genius to get educated. It has been written about a teenage boy who left school and is unemployed. That person wants to do anything just to grab attention and is of the view that he is a very smart individual and he can do anything as he is already talented and there is no room for improvement. He thinks that he is too good for education that he takes it for leisure. The person is ready to kill anything which shows how mentally disturbed he is. The successive events in the poem tell the story that he wants attention because he is ignored by people. So, he decides to start hurting people so they could notice him this way. (Sheerpoetry.co.uk, 2016)

The tone in the poem is angry. It starts with “Today I am going to kill something” which describes the psychotic behavior of the person. The language of the poem is colloquial and the poetess has used slangs at some points. On the opposite side, the line “I squash a fly against the window with my thumb” reminds the boy of a Shakespeare book that he read in school. So it’s contradictory that he has used words like ‘boredom’ and he mentioned Shakespeare as well because these are the opposites. Moreover, there is no formal rhyme scheme in the poem. (Sheerpoetry.co.uk, 2016)

The boy who has been discussed in the poem is on the verge of becoming a criminal as he wants to kill people. The line “I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name” shows how badly he tries to convince himself that he is talented and genius but in the end, he starts planning a murder so that he could feel good about himself. The line “I touch your arm” implies his final move of murdering someone as he goes out with his knife. (Emilyspoetryblog.com, 2016)

The poem can be linked with “A mother in a Refugee Camp” by Chinua Achebe. The main theme of that poem is that death is inevitable and losing a loved one is extremely traumatic for people. The poem paints a picture of a helpless mother holding her dying son in a refugee camp for the last time. It depicts the pain of a mother at the loss of her child.

These two poems are quite relatable as these involve the feelings of loss. In “Education for leisure”, the boy wants people to be dead and is quite lost. He wants to kill everybody as he himself is a lunatic. The other poem shows the love of a mother for her child. She wants to do anything to save her dying child but he is going far away in front of her eyes. That’s how different people view death and loss differently. All things aside, death and loss is something that is unavoidable. Everyone has to face it one day or the other. This poem is easy to understand for the readers as there are no metaphors or difficult language.