A speaker imagines her first two weeks of life in hospital as pure happiness, fed on time every few hours, and the hungry nights once she went home, when she was left to cry.
How Olds's single block of free verse, physical detail and adult irony look back on infancy as a lost paradise, and on a first lesson that the world will not always give you what you need.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Sleep. Milk. Heat.', 'heaven'.
Form: one unbroken stanza of free verse with long, run-on sentences, broken by single-word sentences, in an adult voice that imagines its own first weeks of life.
Context: Sharon Olds (born 1942 in San Francisco), whose candid, physical poems about her own body, childhood and family made 'the minutiae of a woman's everyday life' a subject for poetry; and her Pulitzer Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize for Stag's Leap (2012).
In part (b), suggested for a young person's view of life (2023), where OCR points to the child's heaven, the energy of the run-on lines and the simple happiness of 'Sleep. Milk. Heat.', and for a parent and a child in the specimen.
Links within the cluster: Baby Song (a baby's view of the first days), The Bluebell (childhood remembered as paradise) and Love (the first days seen by a mother).
Beside an unseen poem: a poem about infancy, feeding and care, or an adult looking back on early childhood.
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.
