Childhood Memories

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