Childhood Memories

“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.”

In this first stanza, Saphier establishes the poem’s core conceits, as well as its central image—the setting of a lush and deeply knotted woods. The poem’s opening line begins with a metaphor also offering the overarching gesture of the poem.

In this stanza, the speaker is not simply thinking of the wilderness of childhood but trying to physically access the memory. By referring to the memory as “Those years” (Line 1), the speaker’s recollection is staged as aesthetically distant and overgrown. By using the concrete metaphor rather than the simile—“Those years are like the foliage of trees”—the reader gets the sense of the speaker working their way into his childhood memories which, in the second line, reveal themselves to be occluded from the speaker “hidden by bushes” (Line 2) and themselves, hiding a “gray haze topped with silver”(Line 3). This is a struggling enterprise. By the stanza’s final lines, the reader arrives at the true object of the speaker’s meditation: the “swinging steps of my first love / the Danube” (Lines 4-5). Both the speaker and the reader emerge together here; both arrive at “the Danube” (Line 5) at once. This is a smart means of drawing the poem’s reader into the memory without overtly stating that is what is happening.

“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.”

In Stanza 2, Saphier opens the door to new elements of the poem. Line 6 continues the Danube’s personification as the speaker’s “first love” that started at the end of the last stanza. The same line also introduces the poem’s emerging motif of imagery reflected on the surface of the water. Using this imagery, Saphier presents two images from different planes in impossible containment together (a monastery on the river, a fish eating sun splinters). The “parading [monastery]” (Line 8) on the stanza’s second line is a man-made interruption, which the speaker claims is moving slowly to the Black Sea. Of course, the monastery is not moving but rather is given the effect of movement on the water’s streaming face. This sense of water flow mirrors the poem’s enjambment, which drives the reader over the end of each line to continue reading into the subsequent one. In this sense, the poem itself mimics the behavior of a river. At the same time, the image of monasteries moving to the Black Sea evokes a sense of foreboding, of change and transience—invading the delicate memory and warning of its end.

“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.”

Among the stanza’s many arresting allusions to Christianity, Saphier’s use of auditory imagery is also on display here. The first line of the third stanza again offers personification of the Danube as the speaker’s affection, evoking a lover with the mention of “bed” (Line 10) (alluding to the murky bottom of a river) and in the previous stanza, “face” (Line 6) (alluding to its surface). Saphier lends power to this endured metaphor by his instinct for lineation. By breaking the line just after the word “face” (Line 6) in the second stanza and after “bed” (Line 10) in the third, he creates double meaning in the lines, signaling to the reader that there are layers in the words running deeper than a surface reading of the poem.

Saphier also succeeds in the auditory textures of the line, choosing words with sibilant consonant sounds throughout the stanza to create a pleasing noise that only briefly but not overtly arrives at alliteration. The line “small fishes snapped sun splinters” (Line 13) is all sibilant, each “s” feeding into the next, but in truth the “s” begins with “ceremonies on the arrival of Messiah” (Line 12) and concludes at “pleasure of the monster” (Line 14). Although working without rhyme or meter, Saphier is able to use these sonic qualities to create a pleasing sense of timing and rhythm exemplifying the strengths and creative use of free verse. 

“Along its shores 

red capped little hours danced

with rainbow colored kites,

messengers to heaven.”

Here, Saphier shifts from the river’s reflection, turning his attention to the Danube’s shore where “red capped little hours danced / with rainbow colored kites” (Lines 16-17). The term “little hours” (Line 16) suggests the unitary division of Christian prayer. Such a time of day—prayer time—is a liminal one and cornerstone of modernist poetry which often seeks to explore boundaries and liminality—those spaces and times of day in which time seems to exist in a state of flux. “[R]ed cap[s]” (Line 16) could refer to religious garb of children studying the orthodoxy who are flying kites instead of tending to their prayers.

Alternatively, this line can be read as sans human beings. The word “kite” (Line 17) may allude to the large bird of prey (a type of hawk) referred to in Leviticus. Birds have a special relationship to poetry and are often seen as mediators of the sky-firmament, a construction originating in Romantics poetry. This fits with the stanza’s final image of “messengers to heaven” (Line 18). In this reading, the “red capped little hours” (Line 16) may be toadstools not literally dancing, but fixtures one would find if in river country long enough. Of Saphier’s clear and concrete imagery, the poem’s opacity here lends the line difficulty which serves to slow a reading, like a puzzle—offering a point of tension to revisit.

“My memory is a sigh

of swallows swinging

through a slow dormant summer

to a timid line on the horizon.”

In the poem’s fifth and final stanza, Saphier completes the turn signaled in the fourth. Entirely abandoning the unifying image of the Danube, the speaker repeats their initial action in a musical reprise of the first stanza—accessing the memories again in a new metaphor. No longer a vast and knotted wood, now the speaker’s memory is only a “sigh of swallows swinging” (Lines 20-21). The summer is dormant and slow, and the swallows escape the poem, driving the reader’s attention to the poem’s ending vista, “a timid line on the horizon” (Line 23).

If the poem’s previous stanzas are subdued, this one is a mere whisper. Separate from the poem’s middle stanzas, presumably driven by the mystery and awe of youth in deep woods, the trip back is different somehow, the path more worn, the sights less magnificent, the observer more jaded.