Venus's-flytraps — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Venus's-flytraps
The poems
What you need to know
A five-year-old boy wades through sunny grass to a field of yellow flowers, boasting, daydreaming and letting slip things a child should not know, from the railway tracks to his mother calling him a mistake.
How Komunyakaa's child's voice, stepped free verse and images of flowers that trap and devour show innocence already darkened by the adult world.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I am five, / Wading out into deep / Sunny grass', 'Unmindful of snakes', 'Quivering in sluggish heat', 'Don't mess with me', 'I can hurt / You with questions / Like silver bullets', 'mouths like where babies come from', 'Their ears hurt.', 'I know things / I don't supposed to know', 'These yellow flowers / Go on forever', 'My mama says I'm a mistake'.
Form: free verse in short lines stepped across the page, in a five-year-old's present-tense voice, with the repeated boast I am five, ampersands, and run-on lines that slide from innocence to knowledge within a single line.
Context: Yusef Komunyakaa (born 1947 in Bogalusa, Louisiana), the son of an illiterate carpenter, who grew up in the rural, segregated South as the Civil Rights Movement began; his army service in Vietnam, which earned him a Bronze Star; the Pulitzer Prize for Neon Vernacular (1994); and the poem, among his most taught, rooted in the Bogalusa of his childhood, the 'magic city' he wandered as a boy.
OCR set this poem in June 2023 beside Shel Silverstein's Dirty Face, on a young person's outlook: most saw the child's neglect, his unsettling knowledge and the cruel edge of 'Their ears hurt.', against the cared-for child of the unseen poem; it is also suggested for sad thoughts (2025).
Links within the cluster: Midnight on the Great Western (a child alone facing a dark world), Out, Out— (a child exposed to danger), Holy Thursday (children let down by adults) and Theme for English B (a young Black American voice).
Beside an unseen poem: a poem in a child's voice; check whether the unseen child is cared for or neglected, and whether the voice is playful, troubled or both.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
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.
