What Were They Like? — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
What Were They Like?
The poems
What you need to know
An enquirer asks six questions about the way of life of the people of Vietnam, and a second voice answers that after the bombing it can no longer be known: their lanterns, ceremonies, laughter, ornaments, poems and songs are lost.
How Levertov's question-and-answer structure, gentle images of the past set against images of burning and bombing, and a hesitant, uncertain voice show a whole culture destroyed by war and remembered only in fragments.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'lanterns of stone', 'Were they inclined to quiet laughter?', 'epic poem', 'light hearts turned to stone', 'children were killed', 'bitter to the burned mouth', 'the bones were charred', 'was like a song'.
Form: two stanzas, six questions and then six answers that take them in turn, in unrhymed free verse; the answers move from short, blunt replies to a long, lyrical picture of village life before ending in silence.
Context: Denise Levertov (1923–1997), born in Ilford, Essex, a civilian nurse in London during the bombing of the Second World War, who moved to the United States in 1948; her campaigning against the Vietnam War, which shaped her poems of the 1960s; and the Vietnam War itself, a 20th-century conflict whose bombing devastated the country's people and way of life.
Links within the cluster: Lament (war's damage to people and places), The Destruction of Sennacherib (a whole people destroyed), Songs for the People (singing and silence) and We Lived Happily during the War (letting destruction happen far away).
An unseen poem paired with it might share a culture or a place lost to war, questions that cannot be answered, or the suffering of ordinary people.
Examiners in 2023 found most answers kept to the second stanza, the children as buds and the paddy fields as mirrors; they suggest seeing the questioner as a historian piecing together a lost culture, not as someone ignorant, and found some misread bitter to the burned mouth as anger.
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.
