Warming Her Pearls — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Warming Her Pearls
The poems
What you need to know
A maid wears her mistress's pearls all day to warm them, imagines her mistress's evening and longs for her at night, knowing her love can never be spoken or returned.
How Duffy's dramatic monologue, the pearls, the contrasts of heat and cold and of maid and mistress, and the sensual language present a hidden, one-sided desire shaped by class.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Next to my own skin', 'My mistress bids', 'warm them', 'my slow heat', 'cool white throat', 'She fans herself', 'on my neck, her rope', 'my attic bed', 'I lie here awake', 'I feel their absence'.
Form: a dramatic monologue in six unrhymed quatrains in the maid's voice and the present tense, with enjambment that runs her thoughts on from line to line and stanza to stanza, moving from morning to night and ending with the maid alone and burning.
Context: Carol Ann Duffy (born 1955 in Glasgow), Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2019; Selling Manhattan (1987), the collection of this poem of a maidservant wearing her mistress's necklace, which won the Somerset Maugham Award; and the gulf between a lady and her maid, and a desire between women that could not be spoken.
Links within the cluster: Dusting the Phone (longing that is not returned), A Song (an unequal love), Bright Star (lying awake with desire) and Poem for My Love (watching the beloved).
OCR set it in June 2025 beside an unseen poem on a love that is stronger on one side; examiners praised answers on obsession, power and repressed desire, the rope and fire imagery and the rigid six stanzas, and noted that its ending is resigned rather than despairing.
Pairs well with an unseen poem about unrequited love, secrecy or power in a relationship: compare who holds the power in each.
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.
