18 pages • 36 minutes read
William SaphierChildhood Memories
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1920A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Nostalgia
The question of memory is a subject of much meditation for poets, often the central focus of letters, analysis, and rumination. Romantics poet, William Wordsworth wrote in his landmark essay Lyrical Ballads, that, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Among the many strengths of poetry as an art form is in its tracing the mind’s crest and troughs. In Saphier’s poem, the imagery offered by the simple act of remembering is given center stage. In doing so, Saphier elevates the human act of remembering itself.
In the poem’s early stanzas, the waters of the Danube River and the nearby forest are depicted as a natural environment of wonder to which the reader is being given access via the speaker’s simple but thorough descriptions. The poem presents imagery of Saphier’s childhood recollections in Romania as mysterious, and rife with symbolism. However, in the poem’s final stanza, the dramatic turn of the poem dramatically switches the tone of its rendering. When the final stanza repeats the initial gesture of remembering, it may be viewed as a sigh of defeat. The driving symbol, the Danube Rvier, switches to that of a swallow flying away, moving on. Eventually a memory’s final fate is to be released or tucked back into the corners of the mind only to be recalled when needed at a later time.
Mimesis
Mimesis is a Greek word meaning imitation; it is a popular device found in much art and literature—both historical and contemporary. For Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, imitation was foundational in the pursuit of artistry, as they pointed out every actor or writer is recreating (imitating) what they observe in the world around them. Mimesis is a way of critiquing art, but it is often also gestural.
In the second and third stanzas, Saphier captures the reflective property of the water’s surface. By doing so, Saphier is imitating water’s reflective quality. By evoking the river Danube, the poet opens a door not only into the nationalism and history of Romania—where Saphier would have spent his young days in proximity with the Danube—but also the mimetic effect of water and its relation to the poetic form. The Danube is Europe’s second-longest river delta, flowing from Germany to the Black Sea. In Romania’s storied past, the flow of the river has often determined the shape of the nation, which had only just been newly established as a kingdom for 40 years at Saphier’s time of writing in 1920. Therefore, just as the river is a living and moving entity shaping the southern border of Romania, it also winds through and even gives structure and shape to the poem itself.
Religion
In “Childhood Memories,” religious symbols are juxtaposed with menacing imagery, creating an air of anxiety and foreboding, especially where the speaker references the Leviathan (Line 11), a monstrous figure in the scripture. Saphier first brings religion into the poem when he describes monasteries reflected on the river’s surface: “On its face / grave steel palaces with smoking torches, / parading monasteries moved slowly to the Black Sea” (Lines 6-8). The image of a parading monastery is evocative of the pastoral tradition in poetry—an ancient mode stemming from early Greek and Roman verse—that considers ceremonies, usually staged in an idyllic rural setting, with a slow procession of a tribute (goat or oxen) being led to slaughter as a religious sacrifice. In an inventive twist, the sacrifice has been switched for the image of an imposing, monastery being led out to the sea on the river’s surface.
In other places, though, Saphier touches on religious symbols as a source of renewal. Where he describes “bobbing small fishes” (Line 13) he references a keystone of Christian imagery: the Ichthys fish, a symbol adopted by early Christians in secret to avoid Roman persecution. The image of the fish in reference to Jesus Christ also recalls the story of the early Eucharist, when Jesus performed his miracle of multiplying the stock of fish to feed the throngs of people who had come to hear his sermon. These references to religion, each placed by the poet as reflections on the water of the river Danube, may not allude to any specific allegory Saphier personally subscribed, but rather work to reflect Romania’s devout Orthodox Christian community which still thrives today.
The theme of religion appears elsewhere in Saphier’s body of work, most notably associated with Judaism in his poem “Conscience.”
