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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.
William Blake
Charity children walk two and two into St Paul's Cathedral to sing, watched over by the guardians of the poor.
Anne Brontë
A bluebell brings back the poet's childhood, in a memory both sweet and sad.
Thomas Hardy
A boy travels alone on a night train with a key round his neck, towards the "world unknown" that gives the anthology its title.
Robert Frost
A boy cutting wood with a buzz saw loses his hand and his life, and those around him turn back to their own affairs.
Thom Gunn
A newborn speaks, wishing it could be put back where it was warm, in the womb.
Sylvia Plath
A playful run of images addressed to the poet's unborn child.
Gillian Clarke
The poet remembers her mother bringing a drowned girl back to life at a lake, and wonders how far memory can be trusted.
Sharon Olds
Wondering what she is like underneath, the speaker imagines her own first two weeks of life.
Yusef Komunyakaa
A five-year-old's voice, wandering through a field, mixes innocence with things the child only half understands.
Kate Clanchy
A new mother meets her baby son as a kind she has never met before, with a love that overwhelms her.
Langston Hughes
Asked by his instructor for a page that is true, the only Black student in his class asks who he is, and what he shares with his white teacher.
Raymond Antrobus
A father patiently teaches his deaf son to read and say his own name, in a circling form that mirrors the learning.
Zaffar Kunial
Kunial links his own birth to his mother's death, alluding to the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert.
Warsan Shire
Addressed to a friend, the poem honours both their grandmothers, from Somalia to Wales, in the grandmothers' own languages.
Theresa Lola
The poet remembers her brother's birth and naming ceremony as markers of her grandfather's decline: the balance of birth and death.
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: When I have fears that I may cease to be (John Keats), Spring and Fall: to a Young Child (Gerard Manley Hopkins), Ode (Arthur O'Shaughnessy), Red Roses (Anne Sexton), Farther (Owen Sheers). 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.