A newborn baby, just out of the womb, complains about the bright, strange room it has fallen into and longs to go back to the warm, dark comfort it has lost.
How Gunn's rhyming couplets, lullaby rhythm and the baby's grumbling voice make birth a comic but unsettling first loss, with the whole of time waiting outside.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'private ease of Mother's womb', 'lighted room'.
Form: fourteen short lines in rhyming couplets, like a lullaby, spoken by the newborn in the present tense, opening and closing on the same rhyme of womb and room.
Context: Thom Gunn (1929–2004), born in Gravesend, Kent, the son of two journalists, whose parents divorced when he was ten and whose mother died when he was a teenager; he studied at Cambridge, then settled in San Francisco, where he lived for the rest of his life; OCR's specimen guidance reads the poem as a witty account of the pain of being born, told from the baby's side.
In part (b), chosen by a minority for how youth and age differ in 2024, who wrote well about the baby facing the less welcoming world beyond the womb; OCR also suggests it for sad thoughts (2025) and a young person's view of life (2023).
Links within the cluster: My First Weeks (an infant's own view of its first days), You're (a baby before birth), Love (a newborn seen by the mother) and Prayer (the moment of birth).
Beside an unseen poem: a poem about birth, a baby or a child's first experiences, especially one in a child's voice.
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.
