Theme for English B — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Theme for English B
The poems
What you need to know
A twenty-two-year-old Black student, asked by his white instructor to write an honest page about himself, describes his walk home to Harlem and the things he likes, and wonders whether his page will be different because of his race.
How Hughes's conversational free verse, questions, lists and occasional rhymes show a young man defining himself, and his bond with an older, freer instructor, each a part of the other.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Go home and write / a page tonight', 'I wonder if it's that simple?', 'this college on the hill above Harlem', 'I am the only colored student in my class', 'Harlem, I hear you', 'I hear New York, too', 'Bessie, bop, or Bach', 'So will my page be colored that I write?', 'a part of you, instructor', 'That's American', 'although you're older—and white— / and somewhat more free', 'This is my page for English B'.
Form: free verse in the student's voice, opening with the instructor's rhymed command, building lists of places and likes, letting rhymes click into place at key moments, and ending by naming itself as the page he was asked to write.
Context: Langston Hughes (1901–1967), born in Joplin, Missouri, a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance whose poems draw on jazz and blues; his year at Columbia University, which he left because of the racial prejudice he met there, before graduating from Lincoln University in 1929; Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), the book-length poem, shaped by jazz, that includes this poem; and colored, the word then in common use for Black Americans.
OCR has not yet set this poem; its guide suggests reading it as a dialogue between youth and age, in which the young man and his older teacher learn from each other.
Links within the cluster: Happy Birthday Moon (learning as a way of finding yourself), Tea With Our Grandmothers (heritage and identity), Holy Thursday (education, privilege and the poor) and Venus's-flytraps (a young Black American voice).
Beside an unseen poem: a poem about school, a teacher, identity or growing into adulthood.
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.
