We Lived Happily during the War — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
We Lived Happily during the War
The poems
What you need to know
A speaker confesses that when bombs fell on other people's houses they protested, but not enough, and lived comfortably while their own country fell around them, in a world ruled by money.
How Kaminsky's short and long lines, enjambment, the repeated house and money, the bracketed plea for forgiveness and the title returning as the last line show the guilt of those who let a war happen.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'And when they bombed other people’s houses', 'we opposed them but not / enough', 'in my bed, around my bed America / was falling', 'invisible house by invisible house', 'I took a chair outside and watched the sun', 'In the sixth month / of a disastrous reign', 'in the house of money', 'our great country of money', 'forgive us', 'lived happily during the war'.
Form: a short free-verse poem that runs on from its title, whose lines swing from single words (protested) to long, piled-up phrases, with the repeated of money, enjambment across America / was falling, and the title returning as the last line.
Context: Ilya Kaminsky (born 1977), born into a Jewish family in Odesa in the Soviet Union, who lost most of his hearing at four and whose family was given asylum in the United States in 1993; Deaf Republic (2019), a fairy tale in verse about a town that stops hearing in protest after soldiers shoot a deaf boy, which this poem, written in 2013, opens; and the comfort and money of a country whose wars happen elsewhere.
Links within the cluster: What Were They Like? (letting destruction happen far away), Flag (patriotism that blinds people to others' suffering), Partition (guilt at not doing enough) and Lament (the global reach of modern war).
An unseen poem paired with it might share people who are untouched by a war, distance from suffering, or guilt.
OCR's specimen paired it with John Agard's In Times of Peace on how war affects people, and examiners in 2024 saw it chosen often for part (b); the mark schemes read it as people who believed the war was none of their business and saw their guilt too late.
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.
