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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.
Helen Maria Williams
A woman whose lover has little to give would gladly share his frugal meal and humble cottage, so long as she shares them with him.
John Keats
Keats longs to be as constant as a star, not keeping lonely watch over the world but held for ever close to the one he loves.
Robert Browning
A lover asks for the whole of a life to be gathered into one intense moment.
Emily Brontë
Love is a wild rose that blooms and fades; friendship is the holly that stays green through the winter.
Derek Walcott
After a relationship ends, the speaker promises that you will learn to welcome back, and love, the self you neglected.
Sylvia Plath
A mother responds to her newborn child, moving from a sense of strangeness towards tenderness in the night feeds.
Liz Lochhead
A witty refusal of Valentine's Day clichés, from red roses to singing telegrams.
James Fenton
A speaker recovering from heartbreak turns down the romantic sights of Paris and wants only the person beside them.
Carol Ann Duffy
A maid who wears her mistress's pearls to warm them reveals a longing that crosses the divide of class.
Jackie Kay
Waiting for a lover to call, the speaker cleans and watches the phone, caught between hope and dread.
Martin Carter
A protest poem addressed to a friend, in which personal commitment and solidarity with protesting sugar plantation workers in British Guiana go together.
June Jordan
A late poem, published after Jordan's death, that finds calm and peace in the arms of the beloved.
Rita Dove
The start of a relationship, perhaps not a serious one, in which sensuous images say what words do not need to.
Raymond Antrobus
Named after the pub where his father drank, the poem weighs a son's love for an alcoholic father and the patience it asks of him.
Fatimah Asghar
Addressed to the poet's sister, the poem imagines their dead parents waking and meeting to dance all night.
These poems are not in OCR's anthology. OCR's specification asks you to read beyond your cluster, because part (a) sets a poem you have not seen, and these are annotated in full.
OCR replaced five poems in this cluster in 2022: A Broken Appointment (Thomas Hardy), Fin de Fête (Charlotte Mew), The Sorrow of True Love (Edward Thomas), An Arundel Tomb (Philip Larkin), Long Distance II (Tony Harrison). 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.