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.