Love and Friendship — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Love and Friendship
The poems
What you need to know
Brontë compares love to a wild rose-briar, sweet in spring and summer but bare in winter, and friendship to the holly, dark beside the rose but green all year, and advises choosing the holly.
How Brontë's extended metaphor of two plants, the seasons, rhetorical questions and a final command present friendship as more lasting than romantic love.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Love is like the wild rose-briar', 'Friendship like the holly-tree', 'The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms', 'But which will bloom most constantly?', 'Yet wait till winter comes again', 'who will call the wild-briar fair?', 'scorn the silly rose-wreath now', 'deck thee with the holly's sheen', 'when December blights thy brow', 'He still may leave thy garland green'.
Form: three quatrains in short, regular lines with alternate rhymes, built on the contrast of two plants, with a question ending each of the first two stanzas and a last stanza of advice addressed to thee.
Context: Emily Brontë (1818–1848), who grew up in her father's parsonage at Haworth among the moors, published poems as Ellis Bell in 1846 and Wuthering Heights in 1847, and died of tuberculosis at thirty; and her sister Charlotte's choice of a few poems from the papers Emily left, introduced with a portrait of Emily's love of the moors and of liberty.
Links within the cluster: A Song (love tested by time and distance), I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine (rejecting showy romance), Bright Star (the wish for constancy) and Lullaby (love that lasts).
OCR's specimen mark scheme reads it as a criticism of romantic love through its seasonal imagery, and the 2024 mark scheme suggests it for a satisfying relationship, for its praise of friendship's constancy.
Pairs well with an unseen poem about friendship, or love that fades: compare how each poem uses nature and the seasons.
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.
