What I loved about this poem was the crackle of the language. Someone mentioned sotto voce in an earlier post, and that has its place, but lyric intensity done right is amazing.
For me, the epigraph serves to pardon some of the archaic language in this sonnet. Without it, I'd be confused by "butchered peasants" and the general medieval atmosphere. In fact, it pushes up against that risk even with the epigraph, but at least that prepares us.
The couplet kind of kills it for me. It's such a tidy and moralizing end. I also have problems with the stress count in L13. But mostly it's just the let down after the toxic brew of the third quatrain that really irks me.
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