William Saphier’s "Childhood Memories" is a modernist lyric poem confronting themes of isolation, contemporary anxiety, and Saphier’s status as an immigrant. The poem was published in 1919 in the Others, a monthly modernist magazine where Saphier served as co-editor with Alfred Kreymborg. The poem appeared alongside such notable colleagues and foundational poets as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore. “Childhood Memories” is among Saphier’s better known poetic works.

Poet Biography

William Saphier was a Romanian-born poet born at the turn of the century in 1886 (day unknown) and who died on March 31st, 1942. Also an illustrator by trade—with a published book of drawings titled The Book of Jeremiah, Including the Lamentations—Saphier’s surviving body of poetry is thin. Most of his poems center upon short and introspective glimpses into his childhood, dealing with themes of religion and anxiety.

As he wrote, Saphier reflected the modernist movement as it was iterating itself in the early twentieth century in America. An enigmatic figure, Saphier made New York City his workplace and home. “Childhood Memories” is perhaps his best-known poem.

Poem Text

Those years are foliage of trees

their trunks hidden by bushes;

behind them a gray haze topped with silver

hides the swinging steps of my first love

the Danube.       

On its face

grave steel palaces with smoking torches,

parading monasteries moved slowly to the Black Sea

till the bared branches scratched the north wind.

On its bed

a great Leviathan waited

for the ceremonies on the arrival of Messiah

and bobbing small fishes snapped sun splinters

for the pleasure of the monster.

Along its shores           

red capped little hours danced

with rainbow colored kites,

messengers to heaven.

My memory is a sigh

of swallows swinging

through a slow dormant summer

to a timid line on the horizon.

Saphier, William. “Childhood Memories.” 1920. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

In “Childhood Memories” the poem’s speaker recalls a thickly forested stretch of the Danube—Romania’s second-longest river. The poem’s middle stanzas illustrate reflections caught on the surface of the water, among them a monastery typical of Romanian Christian Orthodox architecture. The speaker describes “red capped little hours […] flying rainbow colored kites” (Lines 16-17) as well as focusing on the fish and birds flourishing in the scene. Light is made tangible in effects such as “sun splinters” (Line 13) and wind’s ethereal passing serves as a dramatic movement pushing the lines forward to the poem’s ultimate conclusion.

Quiet and understated, the poem ends in a reprise of the initial sentiment, reasserting a gesture of memory and recall. The poem closes with the sight of swallows flying away “to a timid line on the horizon” (Line 22).