An interesting connection exists between Stickney's poem and 'The Birth of Tragedy' by Friedrich Nietzsche. Not only was one of his dissertations ('Les Sentences dans la Poésie Grecque d'Homère à Euripide') influenced by the essay, but so too do the words of the poem's speaker. Nietzsche saw the "Dionysian man" as akin to Hamlet: "Both have for once seen into the true nature of things — they have perceived, but they are loath to act; for their action cannot change the eternal nature of things." This sounds a lot like the man the speaker assumes has peered beyond a door and heard something he was not meant to hear.