Childhood Memories

Although lasting only a short time (1912-1917), the Imagism movement became absorbed as a defining quality of modernist literature. By focusing only on concrete details and imagery of the Danube and its surrounding forest, Saphier employs Imagism throughout the entirety of “Childhood Memories.” By withholding narrative constructions except via concrete imagery, the poem seizes on the sense-memory of the river, relaying meaning to the reader. The technique has vestigial traces in ancient Greek works and Japanese free-verse haiku forms, and has allowed modernists to compose verse without inherited meter or rhymes that characterized Victorian and Romantics patterns.

This focus on the imagery in a poem over its ornament was later explicated as “essential” in poetry by poet T.E. Hulme in his essay “Romanticism and Classicism” before becoming championed by such landmark names as Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell.

Despite their leanings toward the sparse language of Imagism, Saphier’s lines push toward surrealism in the abstraction of his images, which often forgo the clarity provided by imagist poets for more opaque constructions. Surrealism is a source of challenge in Saphier’s work which invites readers into impossible scenes or uses seemingly intuitive word play to keep a reader moving through the line. In the poem’s third stanza, “red capped little hours” (Line 16) does not have a universally literal point of access. Instead, the reader must take the poem at face value, gleaning what is possible from the surrounding texture of the lines’ contexts. This allows that the poem is not merely meant to be tied down and discerned, but also that its obtuseness should be viscerally felt by the reader. 

By allowing surrealism into the context of a poem that considers memory its main gesture, Saphier concedes to a central trait of human perception: fallible, discursive, and expressionistic. In painting, notable artists such as Kandinsky and Picasso explored and redefined their craft along the same lines as modernist writers and poets were. By considering the fabric of reality part-and-parcel of the fabric of perception, modernism in graphic art began to do away with representative values. The Dada movement especially sought to contend with this lucidity that had suddenly struck the art world of the 20th century by creating a system without any fixed rules, producing extreme forms of surrealism in montage and sound poetry.

Although Saphier is only lightly touching on the artistic license surrealism affords, its presence in the line suggests a speaker trapped inside childhood memory, where a monster can lurk at the bottom of a riverbed as in a dream. Just two years later, poet T.S. Eliot would find similar depths by staging his landmark modernist classic along the banks of the Thames in the nightmarish cityscapes of “The Waste Land.”