Love After Love — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Love After Love
The poems
What you need to know
Walcott tells the reader that a time will come, after a lost love, when they will greet themselves at their own door, welcome the stranger who has always loved them, and feast on their own life.
How Walcott's second-person voice, future tense and run of commands, the images of the mirror, the letters and the feast of wine and bread present learning to love yourself again.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'The time will come', 'you will greet yourself arriving / at your own door', 'each will smile at the other's welcome', 'You will love again the stranger who was your self', 'Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart', 'whom you ignored / for another', 'who knows you by heart', 'Take down the love letters from the bookshelf', 'peel your own image from the mirror', 'Sit. Feast on your life.'.
Form: fifteen lines of free verse in the second person, moving from the future tense of the opening to a run of short commands, with a feast of wine and bread that suggests a sacred meal, and the self split into two figures who meet as strangers.
Context: Derek Walcott (1930–2017), born in Castries, Saint Lucia, a former British colony, who founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop and in 1992 became the first Caribbean writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Links within the cluster: In Paris With You (starting again after a failed love), Dusting the Phone (a self lost in waiting for someone else), Warming Her Pearls (a life given over to another person, and a mirror) and Poem for My Love (peace after struggle).
OCR set it in June 2024 beside an unseen poem in which a woman calls herself her own bride, on how people see and value themselves; examiners praised answers on the future tense and commands, the letters taken down, the feast and the stranger as a lost or hidden self.
Pairs well with an unseen poem about the self, solitude or recovery from heartbreak: compare whether each speaker looks forward or back.
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.
