The article reviews poetics of memory as the author’s refl ection of the events of infancy and childhood. The aim of the study is to specify the temporal model typical for the authors and the genre of the poem. A comparative analysis of the poems «Аncient Octaves» by Dmitry Merezhkovsky and «Infancy» by Vyacheslav Ivanov is conducted. The literary topoi of infancy and childhood are analyzed, the phenomenological ideas of E. Husserl and М. Merleau-Ponty being basis of the analysis. The phenomenon of infancy is included by the authors into a cultural and philosophical refl ection. The conclusion is that the autobiographical poem by Merezhkovsky represents the genre of lyrical-psychological poem of a memory. Ivanov creates a symbolist poem of memory as a philosophical ego-text. Merezhkovsky and Ivanov diff erentiate the notions «childhood» and «childishness» as state of the soul, since Merezhkovsky depicts the experience of an individual existence of a child based on the motives of existential suff ering, «the house of the dead», isolation, fear. Ivanov makes the system of religious and philosophical motives the basis of the poem’s plot. They are not characteristic for a child’s conscience, yet they defi ne childishness as a state of mind.