What I get out of this poem is a meditation on what turns young men into basketball stars, or bullies, or Storm Troopers--and a conclusion that the three have more in common than we might like to think. The last stanza I take to be alluding to an anti-Semitic incident in which blond young men stone to death a Jewish young man named Saul (identified by implication with the Christian martyr St. Stephen). From its context, the stanza suggests that it is the same competitiveness and hormones and macho posturing that in a different context might drive the same men to be good athletes.
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