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).