A run of questions and answers about a flag, just a piece of cloth that can bring a nation to its knees, make men bold, shame cowards and outlive the soldiers who bleed for it, ends by advising whoever wants one to blind their conscience.
How Agard's riddle-like questions, the repeated reply, rhyme and the ironic last stanza expose the power of patriotism to drive people to fight and die.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'What’s that fluttering in a breeze?', 'It’s just a piece of cloth', 'that brings a nation to its knees', 'makes the guts of men grow bold', 'dares the coward to relent', 'will outlive the blood you bleed', 'How can I possess such a cloth?', 'Just ask for a flag, my friend', 'Then blind your conscience to the end'.
Form: five three-line stanzas; in the first four a question, the same reply and a rhyming third line, and in the last the listener asks how to own such a cloth and is given ironic advice.
Context: John Agard (born 1949), born in Guyana, who came to Britain in 1977, a poet and performer awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2012; the poem's first appearance in Half-Caste and Other Poems (2004), a collection for young readers; and flags as symbols that unite a nation and send its people to war.
Links within the cluster: We Lived Happily during the War (patriotism that blinds people to others' suffering), Papa-T (patriotism and imperial war), Colonization in Reverse (identity and loyalty) and The Destruction of Sennacherib (banners, armies and pride).
An unseen poem paired with it might share patriotism, symbols of a nation, or the gap between the glory and the cost of war.
Examiners in 2023 to 2025 found most students understood its point, how pointless and dangerous patriotism can be, but few looked closely enough at its language, form and structure for the top levels; OCR's mark schemes pick out its imagined conversation and its bleak replies.
OCR's question on this cluster has two parts. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a named poem from the cluster, printed on the paper, with an unseen poem on a linked theme, and rewards analysis of language, form and structure (AO2) most, then your response (AO1); an answer on only one of the two poems cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores one other poem from the same cluster that you choose, from memory, with AO1 and AO2 equally weighted; a poem from a different cluster means only the higher of your two marks counts. Neither part marks context: use it only where it explains a reading. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
