How does Duffy movingly convey the influence of the teacher on the speaker in Death of a Teacher? Death of a Teacher The big trees outside are into their poker game again, shuffling and dealing, turning, folding, their leaves drifting down to the lawn, floating away, ace high, on a breeze. You died yesterday. When I heard the hour – home time, last bell, late afternoon – I closed my eyes. English, of course, three decades back, and me thirteen. You sat on your desk, swinging your legs, reading a poem by Yeats to the bored girls, except my heart stumbled and blushed as it fell in love with the words and I saw the tree in the scratched old desk under my hands, heard the bird in the oak outside scribble itself on the air. We were truly there, present, Miss, or later the smoke from your black cigarette braided itself with lines from Keats. Teaching is endless love; the poems by heart, spells, the lists lovely on the learning tongue, the lessons, just as you said, for life. Under the gambling trees, the gold light thins and burns, the edge of a page of a book, precious, waiting to be turned.