OCR J352 Love and Relationships Poetry Cluster

The Love and Relationships cluster is one of OCR's three set clusters for Component 02 Section A. You will study a selection of poems — typically including Victorian poets (Browning, Rossetti) alongside modern poets (Duffy, Larkin) — and compare how they present love across different periods and contexts.

The cluster's core question

OCR does not set one theme — it sets a question that poems explore differently. In the love cluster, the central question is: What does love do to people? Poems explore love as:

• Obsession and possession (Browning's dramatic monologue)
• Devotion and loss (Rossetti)
• Disillusionment and ambivalence (Larkin)
• Empowerment and transformation (Duffy)
• Desire and its consequences (various poets)

Key poems and their approaches

Elizabeth Barrett Browning — "How Do I Love Thee?" (Sonnet 43, 1850)

Form: Petrarchan sonnet. Barrett Browning uses the traditional love-poem form to articulate the scope of love — each line extends the reach of love across different dimensions (depth, breadth, height). The repeated anaphora "I love thee" creates a cumulative, almost cataloguing structure. The sestet turns to the religious: "I shall but love thee better after death" — love transcends mortality.

Context: Victorian courtship; the sonnet sequence documents Barrett Browning's relationship with Robert Browning. She was an invalid before their relationship; he revived her. The love described is not merely romantic but spiritually redemptive.

Key techniques: anaphora; Petrarchan sonnet form; religious imagery; abstract nouns ("Being, ideal Grace").

Christina Rossetti — "Remember" (1849)

Form: Petrarchan sonnet; volta at line 9. The octave asks the speaker's beloved to "remember me"; the sestet reverses this — "better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad." The volta is dramatic: the speaker's love is so great she would rather be forgotten than cause grief.

Context: Rossetti was deeply religious (High Anglican); the poem engages with Victorian attitudes to death and the afterlife; the speaker's calm acceptance of death reflects her faith. The poem also engages with Victorian gender — the woman speaker speaks from a position of care for the survivor, not self-pity.

Key techniques: volta; imperative mood ("Remember"); the reversal of the sestet; the controlled iambic pentameter suggesting composure in the face of death.

Robert Browning — "My Last Duchess" (1842)

Form: dramatic monologue; iambic pentameter with end-rhyme AABB; deliberately sounds conversational despite the tight form. The Duke of Ferrara is showing the portrait of his last (murdered) wife to an envoy arranging his next marriage. The poem reveals the Duke's jealousy, control and implicit admission of murder through what he does and does not say.

Context: set in Renaissance Italy; Browning uses historical distance to explore contemporary anxieties about male jealousy, the treatment of women as possessions, and the corruption of power. Victorian readers would have recognised the critique while safely distancing it to the past.

Key techniques: dramatic monologue; enjambment creating conversational tone; what is NOT said (the implied murder); the portrait as control beyond death.

Philip Larkin — "An Arundel Tomb" (1956)

Form: six stanzas of regular quatrains; the regularity feels appropriate to the monument being described. An earl and countess lie side by side in stone; Larkin observes the earl's hand holding the countess's. The poem moves from observation to meditation: "What will survive of us is love" — but Larkin immediately questions whether this is true or a beautiful accident.

Context: post-war disillusionment; Larkin was an agnostic, not optimistic about love or continuity. The famous final line is presented ambivalently: is it consoling truth or wishful thinking? The phrase "almost-instinct almost true" suggests it is neither fully instinct nor fully true.

Key techniques: the irony of "almost"; the ambivalent conclusion; the contrast between the permanence of stone and the transience of human life; regular form suggesting the monument's stability.

Carol Ann Duffy — various love poems

Context: Duffy's love poems (The World's Wife sequence; Rapture) reclaim female experience and desire, often subverting male-dominated literary traditions. Her speakers are assertive, witty, sometimes angry, always claiming agency that traditional love poetry denied women.

Key techniques: dramatic monologue with female speakers; subversion of classical/mythological roles; colloquial diction contrasting with elevated subject matter.

How to compare across the cluster

When comparing poems, focus on:

1. What kind of love? Possessive vs devotional vs ambivalent vs transformative.
2. Speaker's relationship to love: Is the speaker in love? Remembering love? Critiquing love?
3. How form reinforces meaning: Does the choice of sonnet (traditional love form) add irony, sincerity, or complication?
4. Context: How does the historical moment shape what love means in the poem?

Example comparison sentence: "While Barrett Browning's speaker catalogues love's scope with devotional certainty — the anaphora 'I love thee' accumulating like a religious litany — Larkin's speaker approaches love's survival with the careful agnosticism of the phrase 'almost-instinct almost true': where Barrett Browning finds certainty in love's transcendence, Larkin finds only the hope of it."

Common OCR exam mistakes

1. Writing about the poems in sequence rather than comparatively — every paragraph must link the two poems.
2. Treating the sonnet form as automatically "romantic" — for Browning (My Last Duchess), the tight rhyme scheme of a love poem contains a murderer's confession; the irony is the point.
3. Ignoring the dramatic monologue's unreliable narrator — the Duke in "My Last Duchess" is not to be trusted; what he reveals inadvertently is more important than what he says directly.
4. Missing Larkin's ambivalence — the famous final line of "An Arundel Tomb" is NOT a simple affirmation; the word "almost" undermines it.