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The 15 poems OCR sets for this cluster, as the anthology has stood since OCR revised it for first teaching in September 2022.
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In J352/02 Exploring poetry and Shakespeare, Section A, you answer one question on your cluster, in two parts. Part (a) prints a poem from the cluster beside a poem you have not seen and asks you to compare them (20 marks, about 45 minutes). Part (b) asks you to explore one other poem from the anthology, from memory (20 marks, about 30 minutes). You may not take the anthology into the exam.
Mary Lamb
A gentle lesson in contentment: a rose-tree cannot bear violets or lilies, and would fret in vain if it tried.
William Wordsworth
A boy takes a boat at night and rows out across a lake until a huge peak seems to stride after him, leaving him troubled for days.
Lord Byron
The Assyrian army besieging Jerusalem is destroyed in a single night by the Angel of Death.
Emily Dickinson
Winter afternoon light brings the speaker an inward, wordless despair.
Keith Douglas
Soldiers return to a battlefield and find a dead enemy soldier with a photograph of his girl, inscribed Vergissmeinnicht: forget me not.
Denise Levertov
Questions and answers about the people of Vietnam, whose way of life the war has destroyed.
Gillian Clarke
An elegy for the creatures and people harmed by the Gulf War of 1991, from the green turtle to the cormorant.
John Agard
Question and answer show how a mere piece of cloth can command loyalty, courage and bloodshed.
Imtiaz Dharker
A woman takes off, one by one, the coverings she has been made to wear, to find what is left of herself.
Sujata Bhatt
At nineteen, a young woman hears from her garden the cries of people stranded at Ahmedabad railway station during Partition.
Louise Bennett
A comic, ironic view of the Windrush generation's arrival in England as colonisation turned the other way round.
Fred D'Aguiar
The poet remembers his grandfather reciting Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade, the Victorian battle mixed up with the Guyanese jungle.
Ilya Kaminsky
A confession by people who lived comfortably and did nothing while their country made war on others.
Caleb Femi
Addressed to a boy who has just turned thirteen, the poem sets the future once promised him against the prejudice he now meets.
Frances E. W. Harper
An abolitionist poet asks for songs that would silence the discord of battle and wrong with a music of peace.
OCR replaced five poems in this cluster in 2022: A Poison Tree (William Blake), The Man He Killed (Thomas Hardy), Anthem for Doomed Youth (Wilfred Owen), Punishment (Seamus Heaney), Phrase Book (Jo Shapcott). A revision guide that lists any of them was written for the earlier anthology.
Rights notice. Most of these poems are still in copyright, so this site quotes them only briefly, for criticism and review under the fair dealing provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. OCR publishes the anthology free of charge at ocr.org.uk.