Education for Leisure Essay Questions

How does the poem frame the speaker's educational experience?

Duffy suggests that the speaker's violent behavior results partly from the failure of the education system. As the poem's title hints, the speaker's education has prepared him for "leisure"—an ironic word choice referencing not enjoyable free time but isolation and unemployment. When the speaker reflects on his education, he thinks about Shakespeare, but remembers this learning only as a source of boredom and even ostracism. To the extent that Shakespeare represents English cultural history and the humanist tradition as a whole, this sense of ostracism is a sign of the speaker's total disconnection from society—one rooted in his educational background.

Discuss the way Duffy uses metaphor to reveal her speaker's mindset.

Metaphorical language is consistently used to suggest the speaker's outsize ego. When exhaling on a windowpane, he describes his own breath as "talent." Later, when describing signing his name to receive unemployment benefits, he calls his signature an "autograph." In both cases, an ordinary action or item connected to the speaker is transmuted, through metaphor, into something extraordinary. For this reason figurative language, which illuminates or creates links between seemingly unlike things, is a particularly useful tool with which to display the speaker's ideas about himself and his links to the outside world.