Poem for My Love — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Poem for My Love
The poems
What you need to know
At peace in the arms of the person she loves, the speaker wonders at how surprising and unlikely their love is, and finds in it a calm she had not expected.
How Jordan's thirteen lines, questions without question marks, missing punctuation, single-word lines and images of night, stars and the natural world present a calm, contented love.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'amazed by peace', 'womanly mirage', 'possibility'.
Form: thirteen lines, one short of a sonnet, with little punctuation, opening with questions that have no question marks, with some lines of a single word and a shift in pronouns as the poem goes on.
Context: June Jordan (1936–2002), born in Harlem to Jamaican-born parents, a poet, teacher and activist in the civil rights, feminist, antiwar and LGBTQ movements, who taught at the University of California, Berkeley; and Directed by Desire, her collected poems, published after her death, where this late love poem appeared.
Links within the cluster: Bright Star (night, stars and lying beside the beloved), Flirtation (quiet desire and togetherness), Love After Love (contentment after struggle) and Looking at Your Hands (the personal and the political).
OCR's 2024 mark scheme suggests it for a satisfying relationship, for its calm contentment and the breathless wonder of its missing punctuation.
Pairs well with an unseen poem about contentment or lying beside a lover at night: compare how each poem creates calm.
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.
