Dusting the Phone — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Dusting the Phone
The poems
What you need to know
A woman waits for her lover to ring, imagining disasters, polishing and dressing for the phone, and feeling trapped by her longing when the call does not come.
How Kay's present-tense voice, short sentences and fragments, the phone as a stand-in for the absent lover, and the unanswered ending present the anxiety and obsession of being in love.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'imagining the worst that could happen', 'going over the best that has been happening', 'The phone rings heralding some disaster. Sirens.', 'The future is a long gloved hand', 'I assault the postman for a letter', 'Silver service. I polish it. I dress for it.', 'Your voice / disappears into my lonely cotton sheets', 'I am trapped in it. I can't move. I want you.', 'Come on, damn you, ring me', 'I don't know what.'.
Form: six three-line stanzas and a single last line, in a first-person voice and the present tense, mixing long lines with short, clipped sentences and fragments, and ending on an unanswered question.
Context: Jackie Kay (born 1961 in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father), adopted as a baby and brought up in Glasgow, Scotland's Makar from 2016 to 2021, whose collection Other Lovers won the Somerset Maugham Award; the poem is collected in Darling: New & Selected Poems (2007).
Links within the cluster: Warming Her Pearls (longing that is not returned), A Song (waiting for an absent lover), The Perseverance (waiting and impatience) and Love After Love (a self lost in love).
OCR set it in June 2023 beside an unseen poem on a speaker craving love; examiners warned that many assumed the two poems felt the same and missed the differences, and rewarded answers that saw the phone standing in for the lover and traced the poem's shifts of mood.
Pairs well with an unseen poem about waiting, absence or obsession: compare how each speaker's mood shifts.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
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.
