Childhood Memories

In the second line of the third stanza, Saphier interrupts the serenity of the landscape he created in the poem’s opening when he warns of a leviathan. In Christianity, a leviathan is an enormous whale with the qualities of a sea serpent who swallows Jonah. Alternatively, the term leviathan is also evocative of the devil. When the stanza makes mention of a “monster”, however, Saphier’s reference is most aptly suggesting a specific passage in the Bible from Isaiah: “In that day, the Lord will punish with his sword — his fierce, great and powerful sword — Leviathan the gliding serpent, Leviathan the coiling serpent; he will slay the monster of the sea” (Isaiah 27:1).

The book of Isaiah is from the Old Testament thought which spans centuries and believed by scholars to have been composed by three different figures and composed in forms of Hebrew poetry. The books that Saphier is referencing (1-39), concerns itself with the destiny of the Hebrew people after their exile out of Egypt, foretelling a coming judgement or rapture. While the tone and gesture in “Childhood Memories” are too heavily bent to modernity’s secular style and secular preoccupations to support an overtly religious reading, Saphier is likely alluding to catastrophe, nonetheless.

According to Herder Dictionary of Symbols, the leviathan was “originally a monster of Phoenician mythology, symbolizing chaos” (Farrell, Deborah. The Herder Dictionary of Symbols. Chiron. 1993.). Considering the historical context of the poem, such chaos would indeed be visited on the Danube in the shape of World War I—the fuse ignited that would eventually set off the literary movement of modernity. By 1916, Romania would join the war effort and suffer heavy losses before the conflict’s end. Therefore, by installing the symbol of the leviathan as a herald of war and catastrophe, Saphier allows the speaker of the poem, presumably his younger self, a kind of premonition. An alternate reading suggests Saphier is writing from the end of the war in 1920 looking back at the brief period of calm before a storm.