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Education for Leisure by Carol Ann Duffy.
- Words:
- 774
- Submitted:
- Thu Feb 26 2004

... Education for Leisure by Carol Ann Duffy This powerful poem explores the mind of a disturbed, angry and upset 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 objection that no one else notices him. The poem contrasts the speaker's deluded belief in his own abilities with the real genius that is creative. We do not know if the poem is based on any real person. There may be an allusion to this in the first stanza, 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














