The speaker and another person share an evening of flirtation with no need to say anything, letting images of an orange, the sun and the night speak for them.
How Dove's short stanzas, sensuous images, personification, alliteration and sibilance, and a single last line present the pleasure and possibility of a relationship just beginning.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'no need / to say anything', 'walking through', 'rolled up her rugs', 'strewn salt across the sky', 'Anything can happen'.
Form: short stanzas, mostly couplets, ending on a single-line stanza, with enjambment across the first stanza break, a personified sun and night, sensuous alliteration and sibilance, and a double comparison that likens a peeled orange to a tulip on a plate.
Context: Rita Dove (born 1952 in Akron, Ohio), Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995 and winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, who studied in Germany, plays the cello and is a keen ballroom dancer, and whose poems often draw on history and the other arts.
Links within the cluster: Now (making the most of a moment), In Paris With You (sensual pleasure), Poem for My Love (quiet desire and togetherness) and Bright Star (night).
One of the most popular new poems for part (b) in 2024: examiners found that every student who chose it understood it, all wrote about the orange, and all saw the salt as stars, though none took that metaphor further.
Pairs well with an unseen poem about the start of a relationship or an evening together: compare what is said and what is left unsaid.
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.
