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: A Place of Imagined Sexual Contentment Published in 1869, A.E. Housman’s A Lad stands as one of the most socially acclaimed collections of English poetry from the Victorian age. This period in British history, however, proves, by judiciary focus (the Cr ....

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.... character is one “who could at once be himself and not himself” (Scott-Kilvert 26). In what Housman himself regarded to be one of his best poems, “XXVII: Is my team ploughing,” the focus is placed upon a conversation between a dead man and one of his friends from his previous life (Housman 18). “XXII: The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread;” meanwhile, expresses an emotional wonder discovered in the eyes of a passing soldier (Housman 15). Both the ambiguous quality of the dead man’s last question (18 ll. 25-26) in poem XXVII and the nature of the chance encounter in XXII stand to exemplify the subt ....