Both criminals in ‘Stealing’ and ‘Education for Leisure’ are people who turned to crime due to their loneliness and boredom. The point of the ‘Stealing’ poem is to show what people do when they are isolated. They turn to crime because they do not know what is morally right or wrong. This is shown when it says on line 11, “Sometimes I steal things I don’t need.” This shows that the person does not necessarily need the things he need, but commits theft because he is bored. This is similar to the persona in ‘Education for Leisure’ as the speaker informs us that he is going to kill “something. Anything” which 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”.
The speaker in ‘Stealing’ is portrayed as a sadist because he commits his crime on purpose with the full knowledge of his/her actions will hurt others. The cruelty and selfishness of his/her actions is the motivation for the theft. This is shown on line 9-10, “Part of the thrill was knowing that children would cry in the morning. Life’s tough.” He is using this as an excuse for his actions, absolving self of blame. He is also feeling that he is doing the children a favour by teaching them about the ‘real world.’ This is exactly the same case for the person in ‘Education for Leisure’ as he squashes a fly against the window with his thumb, flushes the goldfish down the toilet and then at the end of the poem sets out to kill a human. This shows that he is insane and goes to the extreme because he is secluded.
Both narrators in the poems are connected to destruction. The person in ‘Stealing’ breaks into houses and ‘leave a mess’. In lines 17-18 he says, “I took a run and booted him. Again. Again.” This is when the snowman “didn’t look the same.” This shows that the person is insane and loses his temper very easily on a useless thing. In ‘Education for Leisure’, after the person tells us about the flushing of the goldfish “down the bog”, he tells us: “I see that it is good”. This is an obvious echo of the creation story in Genesis. After each day’s work of creation, we read that “God saw that this was good”. We know that the sick character here wishes to “play God”, but he can only destroy where God and Shakespeare create.
There is a lot of isolation in both the poems. In ‘Stealing’, in line13 it says, “I’m a mucky ghost,” this tells us that the person is like a spirit and is outside of society and is unacceptable. He has a “gloved hand” which shows separation from his victims and it acts as a barrier between himself and these others in society. This is similar to ‘Education for Leisure’, where “The cat avoids” him as well as the radio station cutting him off.
As an explanation of how criminal violence happens, the poems are clear enough and quite convincing. Carol Ann Duffy portrays a character we may recognize from fiction and from real life reports in both poems. It has much common with ‘Stealing’, though the criminal, while very unsympathetic still seems vaguely in touch with other people. The speaker in ‘Education for Leisure” lacks the criminal experience and low cunning of the thief in ‘Stealing’. He is weaker character by far, but less predictable.
