Songs for the People — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Songs for the People
The poems
What you need to know
The poet asks to make songs for everyone, the young and old, the weary, children and the poor: not songs of battle and bloodshed but songs of love and duty that will soothe the world's sorrow until war and crime end.
How Harper's ballad quatrains, the repeated Let me, music set against the noise of war and suffering, and the closing image of tender hearts encircling the world make a hopeful demand for conflict to end.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Let me make the songs for the people', 'Songs to stir like a battle-cry', 'Not for the clashing of sabres', 'For carnage nor for strife', 'With more abundant life', 'Amid life’s fever and fret', 'Sweet anthems of love and duty', 'the bright and restful mansions', 'To hush the jangle and discords', 'Girdle the world with peace'.
Form: seven ballad quatrains with a strong beat and a varying number of light syllables, the second and fourth lines rhyming, with the repeated Let me and Songs; in many stanzas the first lines name a need or a conflict and the last lines answer it.
Context: Frances E. W. Harper (1825–1911), born free in Baltimore and orphaned young, an abolitionist lecturer, poet and novelist who campaigned for women's rights and co-founded the National Association of Colored Women; the American Civil War and the struggle for equal rights after it; Atlanta Offering (1895), the collection the poem comes from; and the hymns of abolitionist churches, whose music its stanzas echo.
Links within the cluster: The Destruction of Sennacherib (the sounds of war set against heavenly music), What Were They Like? (singing and silence), Lament (lamenting set against new songs) and Flag (rallying round a flag against a song for the people).
An unseen poem paired with it might share a call for peace or change, music and song, or hope for the oppressed.
OCR set it in June 2024 part (a), with Langston Hughes's I look at the world, on calls for conflict to stop: examiners liked answers that heard its steady rhyme as a calm music answering the disorder of war, and the soft s sounds of 'Music to soothe all its sorrow' as quieting the earlier jangle; few tried its last line, best read as encircling or holding the world together in peace.
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.
