The Perseverance — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
The Perseverance
The poems
What you need to know
Antrobus remembers waiting outside a pub, The Perseverance, as a child while his father drank inside, and holds on to the love and hope he still feels for his father.
How Antrobus's repeated words, the pub's double meaning, direct speech and the future tense of the speaker's hopes present a son's patient, painful love for a father who keeps disappearing.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'man overstanding', 'Just popping in', 'outside', 'disappear', 'spits', 'listening for the laughter', 'I will eat again with my father', 'the yams will boil'.
Form: a poem with an epigraph, built on words that keep returning, such as outside, disappear and laughter, using italics, direct speech, a parking-meter simile and the future tense of the speaker's hopes, with the pub's name standing for both a place and a quality.
Context: Raymond Antrobus (born 1986 in Hackney, London, to an English mother and a Jamaican father), who is deaf and was diagnosed at six; The Perseverance (2018), his first full collection, named after the pub where his father drank, which won the Ted Hughes Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize; and overstanding, a Rastafarian word for understanding that goes beyond the surface.
Links within the cluster: Morning Song (the bond between parent and child), Lullaby (a child's love for lost parents), Dusting the Phone (waiting and impatience) and A Song (waiting for someone who is elsewhere).
Examiners called it a very suitable choice for an unequal relationship in 2025, when students wrote about a son who loves his father more than he is loved back, the mother shut out of the laughter, strangers' hugs, and the title's hint that love takes perseverance.
Pairs well with an unseen poem about a parent, childhood memory or waiting: compare how each speaker feels about the person who lets them down.
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.
