Education for Leisure - Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy's poem 'Education for Leisure' immediately shocks us with its opening line 'Today I'm going to kill something. Anything.' As we continue through the first stanza, we realize that the narrator is an attention-seeker, someone who wants to 'play God', someone who wants to relieve boredom in no uncertain terms.

The first thing to be killed is a fly, squashed against the window. Almost anyone could do this, so we are not taken aback by the action. The cat, however, hides away, more sensitive to an approaching threat. Then the goldfish goes down the toilet, or 'bog' to use Duffy's word here, and we begin to wonder how far this is going to go. The budgie starts to panic. In the final stanza it seems that perhaps the cat and the bird met the same fate as the fish, as 'there is nothing left to kill'. The narrator takes the bread-knife and goes out into the street; the ominous final phrase 'I touch your arm' strikes us all the more forcefully because it is the first time that the reader has been addressed directly, and therefore threatened personally, during the entire poem.

The title 'Education for Leisure' highlights the plight of those who, having gone through their schooling and been pressured to pass exams, are then unable to find a job; it is as though they have been educated just to have free time, and the result here is an extreme case of the effect of boredom, of being ignored. The narrator here is suffering from delusion, 'breathing out talent' on the window, believing himself to be a genius who could 'change the world'. Not having been given the opportunity to do so, he takes matters into his own hands by deciding to kill. This is the most powerful option open to him. We understand that he is on the dole from the sentence 'Once a fortnight I walk the two miles into town for signing on.' Referring to his signature as his 'autograph' reminds us that this is a person who craved fame but found only emptiness in his life. The sentence 'I see that it is good' following the flushing away of the goldfish is a biblical reference, echoing the narrator's idea to 'play God' in the first stanza. As we come to the final stanza, he phones a radio announcer in desperation and tries to convince him that he is a 'superstar'.

It is a little surprising that the poem is so tidily organized into five stanzas of four lines each, but this perhaps serves to emphasize the fact that the narrator's mind has in fact planned a certain course of action. The straightforward, matter-of-fact language is underlined by a number of very short and concise sentences such as 'I pull the chain.'

This is an interesting poem to compare with Simon Armitage's 'Hitcher'. The latter deals with a person who can no longer face the daily grind and resorts to violence when confronted with a hitchhiker who seems to have all the freedom he could wish for. Both poems portray extreme behavior by people who do not somehow fit into what society demands that they be: on the one hand, boredom is intolerable and inspires senseless killing; on the other, not being able to escape the rat race leads to a desperate outburst of anger and violence.

Hitcher

The first stanza of Simon Armitage's poem 'Hitcher' reveals that the narrator has been off work for a while and is under threat of losing his job. He states that he had been 'tired, under/the weather', not seriously ill. He doesn't answer the phone calls from work, so messages are left, and he describes the ansaphone as 'screaming' that he will be fired if he produces another sick note. This is someone who seems unable to face the routine of everyday life. He himself hitches a lift to the place where he has a hired car parked, but gives us no information as to the purpose of his journey or his destination.

The first line of stanza two abruptly introduces the hitcher: 'I picked him up in Leeds'; the hitcher is only ever refered to as 'him' or 'he'. We are told that he is travelling from east to west, 'following the sun', and the only possession he has with him is a toothbrush. He sleeps in the open, on 'the good earth'. He tells the narrator that the truth is 'blowin' in the wind', an obvious quote from a Bob Dylan song of the 1960s. The narrator's comment that the truth could perhaps be 'round the next bend' is an ominous precursor to what follows, but we may not realise this on first read.

The fact that stanza three describes the narrator's sudden violent attack on the hitcher reveals the envy that he felt when confronted by a person who appeared to have total freedom. 'I let him have it' is a blunt description of the physical attack during which the narrator hit the hitcher initially with his own head and then 'six times with the krooklok', directly in his face. Ruthlessness is all too apparent when he tells us that he carried on driving, 'didn't even swerve' during the attack.

Armitage uses enjambment to link the third stanza to the fourth, as the narrator describes how he pushed the hitcher out of the car whilst in third gear and watched him 'bouncing off the kerb'. The statement 'We were the same age, give or take a week' tells us that the narrator obviously made a direct comparison between himself and the hitcher. The hitcher 'said he liked the breeze/to run its fingers/through his hair': the personification brings to life this description that must have aroused such envy in the narrator at the hitcher's freedom that he began his frenzied attack. We are now into the fifth and final stanza, and the narrator's cold-heartedness is once again emphasised in his matter-of-fact tone as he listens to the car radio: 'It was twelve noon./The outlook for the day was moderate to fair.' This is a man who may have just killed someone.

The last two lines begin with another blunt, abrupt sentence: 'Stitch that.' The irony of the last line, 'you can walk from there', is all too clear, as the hitcher would have been in no state to walk having been brutally attacked and forced out of a moving vehicle.

The structure of the poem is in fact very balanced, consisting of five stanzas of five lines each. The lines vary in length but follow the same pattern in each stanza, beginning with a short one, increasing in length until the third line, and gradually decreasing in the fourth and fifth. The only rhymes in the poem are lines three and five in the first stanza ('fired' and 'hired'), and lines three and five in the final stanza ('fair' and 'there').

This is a first-person narrative reflecting different extremes in society: two men of the same age, one of whom has succeeded in escaping the rat-race, the other caught up in it but unable to face up to its demands and threatened with losing his job. Confronted by someone who has found the freedom he so covets, the narrator cannot bear listen to him or see him sitting beside him. Envy, pent-up anger and violence are unleashed. One man may be dead; the other is unrepentent, devoid of emotion.