You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author considers the poem of Lady Jane Grey written when Housman was 15 years old. She shows the contribution of various life experiences to the adolescent fantasies out of which this poem emerged, and which were to find repeated expression in Housman's later poetry. Common fantasies like that of the sadistic primal scene, the mutual involvement of love and death and love and birth and dying to save, assumed peculiar intensity in Housman because, amongst other circumstances, the connexion between birth and death was confirmed for him by his mother having died on his twelfth birthday. Other fantasies show a more idiosyncratic quality, as when father and mother are imagined as putting the brother to death before they make love. While this may be seen as a variant of 'A Child is Being Beaten', the more fatal violence and the connexion between the brother's fate and the love act seems distinctive. Another exceptional fantasy involves the delegation of the role of oedipal hero to a brother. A major factor in the formation of these original fantasies would seem to have been Housman's intense involvement with brothers who replaced him before and during the oedipal period. This protracted struggle with feeling appears in later poetry when he wishes to comfort the 'luckless lads', who likewise lost the mother whose possession he so envied them.