In Paris With You — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
In Paris With You
The poems
What you need to know
A speaker hurt by a past relationship refuses to talk about love or see the sights of Paris, and would rather stay in a shabby hotel room with the person he is with now.
How Fenton's chatty voice, comic rhymes, refrain and images of the wounded and the hostage show a speaker on the rebound, torn between bitterness about the past and pleasure in the present.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I'm one of your talking wounded', 'maroonded', 'downed a drink', 'I'm angry at the way I've been bamboozled', 'on the rebound', 'I don't care where are we bound', 'sod off', 'There's that crack across the ceiling', 'the hotel walls are peeling', 'I'm in Paris with you'.
Form: five stanzas in a chatty, colloquial voice, four of them ending on the refrain, with comic rhymes, a middle stanza of short, indented lines that make one long question, and enjambment that carries the speaker's rush of feeling.
Context: James Fenton (born 1949 in Lincoln), poet, journalist, war and foreign correspondent and Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1994 to 1999, whose collection Out of Danger won the Whitbread Prize; and Paris, the city of sights and romance that the speaker would rather not explore.
Links within the cluster: Love After Love (life after a failed relationship), Now (living for the present), Flirtation (the pleasure of the moment) and I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine (refusing romantic talk).
OCR's specimen question pairs it with an unseen poem on disappointment in love, and its mark schemes suggest it for a difficult (2023), satisfying (2024) and unequal (2025) relationship; examiners found students divided between a speaker satisfied for now and a self-absorbed one on the rebound.
Pairs well with an unseen poem about heartbreak, a new relationship or a place: compare how each speaker hides or shows their hurt.
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.
