Happy Birthday Moon — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Happy Birthday Moon
The poems
What you need to know
A deaf boy's father reads to him every night, tracing the words with his finger; the boy cannot say his own name, makes his father laugh with his mistakes, and the two find a way to hear each other.
How Antrobus's pantoum, with its returning lines, gentle humour and moon imagery, enacts the slow, patient work of learning to speak and the love between father and son.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Dad reads aloud', 'follow his finger', 'white space', 'son who slurs his speech', 'Dad taps the page', 'He laughs', 'I'd like to be the Moon', 'we hear each other, really hear each other'.
Form: a pantoum, in which the second and fourth lines of each quatrain return as the first and third of the next, so the poem moves slowly and circles back to its opening line, with small changes of punctuation and meaning as lines return.
Context: Raymond Antrobus (born 1986 in Hackney, London), the son of an English mother and a Jamaican father, whose deafness was not diagnosed until he was six; his parents' love of poetry, which inspired his own; The Perseverance (2018), the collection that includes the poem, and in 2019 his place as the first poet to win the Rathbones Folio Prize; and Cerys Matthews's musical setting of the poem.
OCR's specimen question pairs it with Robert Hayden's Those Winter Sundays, on fathers and sons; in 2025, students who chose it for sad thoughts struggled, dwelling on the boy's deafness and missing the closeness of 'we hear each other, really hear each other'.
Links within the cluster: Theme for English B (learning and identity), Prayer (words passed from a parent to a child), You're (reaching a child without words) and Love (the bond between parent and child).
Beside an unseen poem: a poem about a parent teaching a child, reading together, or love shown through actions more than words.
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.
