English

English
Education for LeisureThis powerful poem explores the mind of a disturbed person, who is planning murder. We do not know if the speaker is male or female, though this barely seems to matter. What we do know is that he (or she) has a powerful sense of his own importance, and a greater sense of grievance that no one else notices him. The poem contrasts the speaker's deluded belief in hisown abilities with the real genius that is creative. We do not know if the poem is based on any real person, though it has echoes of the true story of the young American woman who shot dead several of her classmates, and when asked about her reasons answered, “I don't like Mondays” (an episode that inspired the Boomtown Rats' rock song with this title). There may be an allusion to this in the firststanza, where the would-be killer says the day is “ordinary” and “a sort of grey with boredom stirring...”
The speaker informs us that he is going to kill “something. Anything” - who or what seems irrelevant, so long as the gesture is dramatic enough and gains the world's attention, because the speaker wishes not to be “ignored” any longer, and would like to “play God”.
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As he killsa fly casually, he recalls doing “that at school. Shakespeare”. What he recalls, vaguely, is Gloucester's speech in Act 4, Scene 1 of Shakespeare's tragedy,King Lear. Gloucester, blinded by his enemies, is thinking of his son (who at this moment stands before him, pretending to be a madman and beggar). He says: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods/They kill us for their sport...” Gloucestertakes the killing of flies as a metaphor for casual suffering that falls on men. The speaker here does it literally, but he also thinks of killing people literally. Gloucester's speech is aprotest against cruelty, not a commendation of it - and the speaker in the poem seems to have missed the point of King Lear, which commends humanity and rebukes cruelty and violence. He thinks Shakespeare'splay is not in the language he speaks, and notes that the fly is also now “in another language” - at least no longer in the world of the living. His comment on Shakespeare is true but not in the way he intends - of course King Lear is written in English, but its values are wholly alien to him. He commits the common error of stupid people in supposing that an author approves of the things hischaracters do. In reading the poem, we should not fall into the same error - Carol Ann Duffy does not want us to admire this speaker.
Mention of Shakespeare prompts the boast that he is a “genius” who could “be anything at all, with half the chance”. But we see that he has no idea of real creativity. As soon as he claims that he can “change the world” he limits this to “something's world”. He kills thegoldfish and notes that the budgie is frightened (how does a budgerigar panic?) while the cat, supposedly as a recognition of his “genius” has “hidden itself”. Almost as an aside the speaker tells us that he is unemployed, and goes into town “for signing on”.
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Finally, as there “is nothing left to kill”, he phones a radio talk show to assert his genius - but is cut off by thepresenter. So he goes out with a bread knife. The poem has been presented as a first-person monologue throughout, but ends by addressing the reader as if he or she were the first human victim - “I touch your arm”.
The poem's title seems ironic - we see that the speaker's education has done him little good. It has not enabled him to find work, nor to cope with the boredom of enforced “leisure”. But thismay not be the fault of the school and teachers - if the response toKing Lear is anything to go by (remembering a metaphor to justify the violence against which it was meant to be a protest).
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The poem is in five stanzas, each of four lines (quatrains). They are unrhymed and the metre is not regular, though many lines are in the form known as Alexandrine (six iambic feet). The lines...