Richard Crashaw, a poet of the Counter-Reformation, was born a Protestant in England, lost his mother during infancy, was converted to Catholicism in his twenties, and died a priest in Italy. Study of his life and poetry leads Geha to the construction that Crashaw's religious conversion represented a negative reaction to his father and an attempt to rediscover his lost mother. The highly masochistic content of his poetry is interpreted as indicating that his unconscious relationship to his mother was based upon identification and reversal of phallic sadistic aims.