preview

duffy and pugh

Good Essays
Open Document

In Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, ‘education for leisure’ and Sheenagh Pugh’s, ‘she was nineteen and she was bored’, both poets look on modern society in a negative way. Both poems look at the themes of suffering and unhappiness when cast out from society.which are two states that are inextricably linkable. Unhappiness can come as a result of suffering, or the need to make others suffer can come from pure unhappiness. Duffy and Pugh both make these distinctions in their work, and are able to engage the reader by exploring these universal themes. In Duffy’s ‘education for leisure’, we find a character who is in the grip of unhappiness and possibly some sort of depression. The opening line, ‘ I am going to kill something. Anything.’ shows the …show more content…

We are reminded of the egotistical nature of the persona that Duffy has created when the phrase, ‘I am a genius’ is repeated. This contradicts what was said about how the character didn’t understand Shakespeare and we see how the character is self-loving and very confident about their intelligence. Throughout the poem we see how the character has been cast out from society. This is shown in the phrase ‘I could be anything at all, with half the chance’, this shows how the character feels they have been let down by the rest of society and they haven’t been given the opportunity to show that they could be a big part of society. This also links into the idea that this character has some sort of hatred towards the education system. In the last stanza it says, ‘he cuts me off’. Although this refers to a telephone call, this is a metaphor for how everyone ‘cuts the character off’. This line comes straight after the phrase ‘he’s talking to a superstar’ which again shows the egotistical nature of this character. We see that the character may have a psychopathic nature in the final phrase, ‘I touch your arm’, this makes the poem very personal as if it could affect you. This sends out a message to the reader that we as a society need to make

Get Access