Love — Youth and Age — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Love
The poems
What you need to know
A new mother describes meeting her newborn son as if he were a strange creature she had never met before, unsure how to hold or feed him, and tries at night to remember exactly how he felt.
How Clanchy's unexpected similes, admissions of not knowing and short, run-on lines show love beginning as wonder and fear rather than instant understanding.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'hot as a smelted coin', 'some rare snowcreature's aureole', 'if you could meet / such a beast, if you could / get so near'.
Form: twenty-five short, run-on lines of free verse in the mother's voice, built on strange comparisons and repeated admissions that she did not know how to care for him, ending on a short, plain sentence.
Context: Kate Clanchy, a prize-winning poet, novelist and teacher who spent thirty years in schools; and her account of how women poets, first Carol Ann Duffy and then others such as Sharon Olds, showed her that poetry could be about lives like her own.
In part (b), suggested for how youth and age differ (2024), where OCR points to the exotic similes that show the distance between the adult and the baby, and for a parent and a child in the specimen, for the mother's wonder and nervousness.
Links within the cluster: You're (a mother imagining her baby), Baby Song (a newborn's own view), My First Weeks (the first days of life) and Happy Birthday Moon (the bond between parent and child).
Beside an unseen poem: a poem about a new parent's feelings, or about meeting someone wholly unfamiliar.
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.
