Love and Relationships overview — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Love and Relationships overview
Overview
What you need to know
The 15 poems at a glance, from Romantic songs and sonnets of longing and constancy to modern poems of desire, heartbreak, self-love, parenthood and grief: poet, form, speaker and the relationship each one explores.
A map of the cluster by theme and by form, so you can choose a fitting poem to write about for any part (b) question.
A table of the 15 poems: poet, form, speaker and one key quotation each.
Longing for someone absent or out of reach: A Song, Bright Star, Warming Her Pearls, Dusting the Phone and The Perseverance.
Unequal or one-sided love: Warming Her Pearls, Dusting the Phone, A Song, I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine and The Perseverance.
Satisfying love and contentment: Poem for My Love, Flirtation, Now, Lullaby and Love After Love.
Time, constancy and the single moment: Bright Star, Now, Love and Friendship, Flirtation and In Paris With You.
Doubting or mocking romantic ideals: I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine, In Paris With You and Love and Friendship.
Loving yourself and starting again: Love After Love and In Paris With You.
Parents and children: Morning Song, Lullaby and The Perseverance.
Love, loss and death: Lullaby and Bright Star.
Love and the wider world of politics, class and history: Looking at Your Hands, Warming Her Pearls and Lullaby.
Night, stars and the natural world: Bright Star, Love and Friendship, Morning Song, Poem for My Love, Flirtation and Lullaby.
Pairing by form: a sonnet and fourteen-line poems (Bright Star, Now, and the thirteen-line Poem for My Love), rhymed songs in regular stanzas (A Song, Love and Friendship), dramatic monologues and spoken voices (Warming Her Pearls, In Paris With You, I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine, Dusting the Phone), free verse addressed to you (Love After Love, Morning Song, Looking at Your Hands, Lullaby), and poems built on refrains and repeated words (In Paris With You, I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine, The Perseverance).
The poems students have chosen most often for part (b): Flirtation, Morning Song, Lullaby, Bright Star and In Paris With You for a satisfying relationship (2024), and poems by Fenton, Kay, Plath and Williams, with the newer Asghar and Antrobus, for an unequal one (2025).
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.
