The epigraph of the poem, "Quam angusta innocentia est, ad legem bonum esse.", is a quotation from Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger): "What a narrow innocence it is, to be good according to the law." Seneca is a writer I've had nothing to do with since Higher Latin, when I was forced to read Letters from a Stoic (in English - it was for the "Classical Studies" side of the course). I remember it as a dry and humourless text that presented a vision of life as a papery shell with all joy sucked out of it. I'm sure I'd find more to interest me now, but at the time it only made me wish we were reading the Epicurians.
The quotation comes from an essay on anger - it can be found in Seneca: Moral and Political Essays, ed. John M. Cooper and J.F. Procopé (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), with an extract to be found in the Google Books preview here - and advocates tolerance towards wrongdoers: "Who can claim himself innocent in the eyes of every law? Suppose he can - to be good in the sense of being law-abiding is a very narrow form of innocence. So much wider are the principles of moral duty than those of law, so many the demands of piety, humanity, justice and good faith, none of them things in the statute-book." (65)
The poem doesn't take up these ideas of tolerance, however. The epigraph is recalled overtly twice in the use of the terms "narrow innocence" and "law" on either side of the "backrooms of the heart" stanza (one of two places in the poem where time ceases to run forward, if I can say that, the other being at the very end). The former is as the boy recognizes himself in the "creature" in the mirror: "baby-faced / pariah; little / criminal, with nothing to confess / but narrow innocence / and bad intentions". "Narrow innocence" here is a condemnation - a superficial obedience with no moral or good-faith force, masking the boy's true desires. The idea is expanded in the "backrooms of the heart" as "Babylon / incarnate", and in "the cries / of hunting birds, unhooded for a kill / that never comes" - always desiring the kill, always refraining only to be good according to the law.
The latter reference is on the other side of the "backrooms of the heart: stanza: "while I tried pretending not to see, my mind / a held breath in a house I'd got by heart / from being good according to a law / I couldn't comprehend." With the latter of these, the narrating self is in a way transposed into the homunculus glimpsed in the mirror - this "house" he has got from being good according to a law he cannot comprehend is the undistorted, "innocent" child's body viewed from inside the "caul of tortured glass."
I was thinking about the description of this child "being good according to a law / I couldn't comprehend" last week in particular because of the reading I was doing for a French class: Marie Chaix's Les lauriers du lac de Constance, a biographical novel (or a novelistic biography) about the author's father, a key figure in the far-right PPF who was imprisoned for collaboration after the war. It was an interesting book to read, but the parts that made most of an impression on me were those when the narrator described her own incomprehension as a small child, and the gulf between her real emotions and those the adults - or her mother in particular - pushed her into displaying by way of their expectations. One of these is when the family has learned from the father - now in an American camp in Germany - of the death of the eldest son, Jean, who the child Marie is scarcely able to remember. Since the death is only assumed, the mother (who has turned to religion) weeps nightly and urges the youngest child to keep praying for Jean's return, and while the child outwardly complies she has nightmares of a ghastly apparition returning, an unquiet ghost that she seems only to want to stop walking for good. Towards the end of the book there is an account of one of the visits to the father, now held in prison a day-trip away across Paris. At the end of the visit the mother tells the guard that the littlest one wants to embrace her father (prisoners and their visitors are kept physically apart). The child is immediately alarmed - she hasn't asked for any such thing. Nevertheless, she is conscious of the privilege that is denied to the older children (who ironically are the ones that really want this opportunity), and runs to the embrace. She deals with her fright by imagining that her father is a bear who is going to lick her, a baby bear.
As I thought about these two, I couldn't help but think of a funnier (and yet equally thought-provoking) description of children struggling to comprehend an adult world that is in fact irrational and incomprehensible: John Hegley's poem, "One Day as We Were Getting Out Our Rough Books", a recollection from the child's point of view of a teacher losing her temper with the class and yelling at them repeatedly, red in the face: "Do you know what you are?" It ends in a way that deserves to be heard in Hegley's recitation style:
and we were very frightened
and we did not know what we were.
