I often find it helpful to offer pupils a model poem to work with. Here is a poem about a very ordinary experience: going shopping with my father. I sometimes use it to explore what Wordsworth termed "two consciousnesses", i.e. the movement of the narrator between their past and their present.

Hungry Ghost

Today I went shopping with my father
after many years. I felt I was back
in time to when I'd follow grandfather
to the market, smelling the spicy scents,
drinking the sights and mingling with the shouts.
Neither buyer nor seller, I would float
like a restless spirit, hungry for life.

The market is bigger. I have grown too.
There are more goods as distances have shrunk.
The prices are higher. I understand
about money and, alas, its bondage
of buyers and sellers. Almost I wish
I was again that hungry ghost, watchful
and floating through the world's noisy bazaar.

Wordsworth said that poetry was "emotion reflected in tranquillity". In this poem of two halves it is the movement in time between the past and present that helps to give it its structure. The first stanza begins in the present as I accompany my father to the market - this conjures up past memories of shopping with my grandfather. The rest of the stanza is given over to describing the past as in a small but vivid vignette. The past comes to life through the use of various senses: smell, taste, sight and sound; as I relive the past.

Adding to the contrasting balance of past and present are the references throughout the poem to shopping: "market", "buyer", "seller", "goods", "prices" and "bazaar". These also aid in the comparison and so help with the poem's unity.

In the second stanza the narrator is entirely in the present, a present in which "distances have shrunk" and "prices are higher", and the prevailing mood is one of nostalgia for childhood innocence and freedom, and for a world that was simpler. The metaphor of the "hungry ghost" that "drinks" in the sights and smells of the past underpins the poem and gives it its title.

Using 'Hungry Ghost' as a model, I ask pupils to select some present experience that they have shared with a family member or friend and which they can associate with a past experience. They are then invited to structure a poem in two equal halves, one half describing the past and the other the present.

The experience might be something quite ordinary, e.g. baking a cake with one's mother at home and remembering a cooking class in school, or washing up (perhaps in a washing machine) and remembering a time when one helped to dry the dishes after one's parent or older sibling had done the washing up. I ask them to use their senses in describing the sounds, the sights and the smells of the past. My poem has fourteen lines, but I tell them to select any short even number between eight and fourteen.

© Debjani Chatterjee

Note: 'Hungry Ghost' may be found in my collection, Albino Gecko (University of Salzburg Press, 1998). 

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