Judge David Kirby’s comments: “Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning couldn’t have foreseen that the dramatic monologue would be put to such use, but that’s what the tradition is all about; you take the best from the past and you ring changes on it. Here, a blood-drenched man speaks his mind, and we despise him, yet we understand him. A poem is not going to work unless the reader can say, ‘Well, yes, I guess I’ve felt that way myself.’ We say that after reading this one and then we flinch, not at the subject but at ourselves, at these beasts and angels we call humanity.”