George Herbert’s “The Collar”

George Herbert’s “The Collar” is an extraordinary poem by an extraordinary poet. The poem expresses a familiar psychological and perhaps spiritual conflict between the desire for freedom and worldly pleasure and the commitment to a more quietly constrained life of piety and religious devotion.

Podcast Audio:

“The Collar”

I struck the board, and cry’d, No more.
                         I will abroad.
     What? Shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the rode,
     Loose as the winde, as large as store.
                Shall I be still in suit?
     Have I no harvest but a thorn
     To let me bloud, and not restore
What I have lost with cordiall fruit?
                         Sure there was wine
          Before my sighs did drie it: there was corn
               Before my tears did drown it.
     Is the yeare onely lost to me?
               Have I no bayes to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
                         All wasted?
     Not so, my heart: but there is fruit,
                         And thou hast hands.
               Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit, and not forsake thy cage,
                         Thy rope of sands.
Which pettie thoughts have made, and made to thee
     Good cable, to enforce and draw,
                         And be thy law,
     While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
                         Away; take heed:
                         I will abroad.
Call in thy deaths head there: tie up thy fears.
                         He that forbears,
               To suit and serve his need,
                         Deserves his load.
But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde
                         At every word,
     Me thoughts I heard one calling, Childe:
                And I reply’d, My Lord.

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Podcast Script:

George Herbert’s “The Collar”

In 1633, one Nicholas Ferrars arranged for the publication of a book written by a close friend who had recently died. The book was called The Temple; Ferrars’ friend was a small-town pastor and poet—George Herbert—who has since become one of the most highly revered religious poets in the language. Herbert is an enigmatic figure. As a young man he distinguished himself at Cambridge University, rising to the prestigious and very visible office of Orator of Trinity College. He seemed to be on the brink of a brilliant public career. But then, for reasons that scholars still debate, he took holy orders and became the parson of an obscure country parish in Bemerton, near Salisbury, where he served until his early death in 1633 at the age of 39.

To say that Herbert was a country parson and a religious poet may suggest that his poems offer straightforward devotional expressions about his relationship with the Divine. This is partly true, though not in the way one might expect. Herbert, like John Donne, is typically classed with the metaphysical poets, meaning that he delights in wordplay and puns, in formal ingenuity, and in a highly varied range of poetic personae, imagery, and dramatic situations. The result is a collection of lyrics that are sometimes funny, sometimes deeply moving, sometimes offering unusual and unexpected images that are nonetheless uncannily accurate. Herbert certainly does not preach at his readers, but through his work he reveals his sense of a divine presence in the everyday joys and struggles of the familiar human world.

It has been a challenge for me to select a single Herbert poem for inclusion in Influential Lyrics—the poems are all so good but so different! That said, one of the most familiar of his lyrics is “The Collar,” a poem that expresses—somewhat surprisingly—the speaker’s urge to free himself from the constraints of a religious life, only to be called back into the fold at the end. So here is George Herbert’s “The Collar”:

[poem]

So, where to begin? I think with this poem it will be helpful to get a comprehensive view of the overall structure before we dig into the details of individual lines and images. Obviously, at the beginning of the poem the speaker is feeling rebellious. He is tired of what he sees as the constraints of living a life of Christian piety and virtue. He is frustrated with himself for having given up so much of his life to religious morality, and now he wants to be free. His rebellious tantrum gets more and more extreme, until he suddenly hears a voice calling “Childe,” and he instantly recognizes his error and accepts—at least implicitly—his obedience to the Divine.

So then…this is a poem that enacts a sort of internal drama—a monologue through which we follow the speaker’s moods from increasing rage to a sudden and unexpected acceptance. The poem doesn’t offer advice or present some deep truth that we need to explicate. Instead, to understand and appreciate this poem readers have to go along with the speaker’s internal narrative—it’s a poem to experience in time like a piece of music or a stage drama, rather than contemplate as a static argument, however beautifully expressed. Of course, none of this is to suggest that the language and form of the poem are just casual; indeed, I would argue that the temporal experience of the poem is only heightened by a closer look at the details. So, let’s have a look…

We can begin with the title: “The Collar.” The word is a good example of Herbert’s fascination with word play—in fact, it’s a three-way pun. First, it is a literal collar—like the collar on an enslaved person or a dog—that signifies that the being wearing the collar is the possession of and under the control of some other agent. Metaphorically, then, this literal collar represents the constraints that the speaker is rebelling against in the poem. Second, the word collar
(C O L L A R) sounds just like choler (C H O L E R) which, in Herbert’s day, meant something like rage or fury. A choleric person is a hot-blooded, short-tempered individual prone to outbursts of anger. Both meanings of the word have obvious connections to the speaker of Herbert’s poem. And there is also a third meaning to the word: collar sounds just like caller
(C A L L E R). Note that the poem ends when the speaker hears a voice calling; that voice, in other words, is another caller. Put these together and we have a poem in which the speaker in a fit of choler strives to throw off his collar, only to quell his fury when hears and accepts the caller. It’s a good demonstration of the wit and sophistication Herbert’s wordplay!

The poem itself begins with the speaker angry with himself for having spent so much of his time sighing and pining within some religious discipline and not exercising his own freedom. Now he’s utterly fed up:

I struck the board, and cry’d, No more.
                         I will abroad.
     What? Shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the rode,
     Loose as the winde, as large as store.

The board is likely a reference to the table in a church where the eucharist—that is, the ceremonial bread and wine in Christian liturgical practice—is taken. But this speaker is having none of it—he strikes the board and says, “No more. / I will abroad.” It’s an appeal for freedom, freedom from what he perceives as the ambition-stifling limitations of a life of Christian devotion. And, interestingly, instead of asserting something as simple as “I’m free,” he claims that “My lines and life are free, free as the rode / Loose as the winde.” That phrase, “My lines and life,” suggests a reflexive reading. Herbert’s lines here—that is these lines of poetry—are, like the speaker’s hoped-for freedom, unconstrained by the usual formal regularity of conventional English verse. In contrast to the regular meters and rhyme schemes of, say, a Shakespeare sonnet, this poem is irregular, even chaotic. (This formal chaos is very evident if you get a chance to see a printed copy of the poem—it’s all jagged lines with a seemingly random rhyme scheme.) As such, it expresses formally the disordered fury of the speaker’s state of mind.

And the speaker himself is full of questions about his own behavior. He says, for example,

Is the yeare onely lost to me?
Have I no bayes to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
All wasted?

To offer a simple explication, maybe he’s lost only a single year of his life to his religious devotion, but in that year he hasn’t earned any “bayes.” Bay leaves are, since the time of the Greeks, the traditional crown of achievement for a poet, and he is lamenting the fact that he hasn’t achieved his poetic aspirations. Likewise, no flowers or garlands—no celebratory public recognition; instead, he’s has been wasting his time. “All blasted? / All wasted?”

The next section of the poem expresses the speaker’s resolution to move on. In answer to his own question about whether everything has been “wasted,” the speaker says:

Not so, my heart: but there is fruit,
                         And thou hast hands.
               Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit, and not forsake thy cage,
                         Thy rope of sands.
Which pettie thoughts have made, and made to thee
     Good cable, to enforce and draw,
                         And be thy law,
     While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.

Well, maybe he’s wasted some time in his devotions, but “there is fruit / And thou hast hands.” Going forward, he plans to “Recover all thy sigh-blown age / On double pleasures.” He is going to stop trying to work though difficult theological questions about “what is fit.” This whole discipline of Christian piety is nothing more than a “rope of sands / Which pettie thoughts have made, and made to thee / Good cable.” To paraphrase: small-minded, submissive, “pettie thoughts” produce this “rope of sands,” which, if one really thinks about it, wouldn’t be much of a rope at all! But if one is gullible enough to believe those “pettie thoughts,” then the rope of sands has the power to “enforce and draw, / And be thy law.” Now, however, the speaker has awakened from the theological illusion generated by those “pettie thoughts” and he sees how fragile they are. He plans to go find and enjoy those “double pleasures”–remember: “there is fruit / And thou hast hands.”

One might be tempted here to see this as an allusion to the biblical story in Genesis—the speaker is resolving to grab that forbidden fruit. The next few lines double down on that resolution:

Away; take heed:
                         I will abroad.
Call in thy deaths head there: tie up thy fears.
                         He that forbears,
               To suit and serve his need,
                         Deserves his load.

The line “I will abroad” is repeated from earlier in the poem, and at this point we have a better sense of the speaker’s line of thinking. He no longer wants to contemplate big questions like death and the afterlife—the “death’s head” is a memento mori, in this case, a skull, the contemplation of which keeps the religious devotee constantly fearful of the fate of his own soul. So “tie up thy fears.” The man who believes all those “pettie thoughts” “Deserves his load,” but the speaker is now resolved to throw off this collar.

However, just as the speaker makes this resolution, this break for freedom, he hears another caller altogether:

But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde
                         At every word,
     Me thoughts I heard one calling, Childe:
                And I reply’d, My Lord.

So here we get a sudden, unexpected reversal. The speaker’s rebellious fit is caught up short by a voice in his head that utters a single word: “Childe.” The reaction is immediate—the speaker, in equally terse terms, acknowledges his “Lord” and thus implicitly recognizes the dominion of “My Lord” and the madness of his appeal for freedom. It’s of course significant that the one word that quells the speaker’s rage is “Childe.” The speaker initially thinks that, if he really wants his freedom, he needs to grow up, become an independent agent, and throw off the collar of Christian piety. But suddenly he recognizes that he has actually been thinking like a petulant, choleric child throwing a tantrum. Genuine freedom, it seems, comes not in separating one’s self from “My Lord” but rather in remaining in good graces with the divine order.

I might make a couple of notes about this dramatic narrative of the speaker’s state of mind. First, one obvious way to interpret the poem has to do with Herbert’s own biography. As I noted earlier, Herbert seemed to be on a path toward a prominent career in public or perhaps court life when he became instead a parson in an obscure country church. It’s possible that this poem enacts a moment of doubt or regret about his chosen calling—maybe he would have had more freedom if he lived a life of “double pleasures” rather than the quietly disciplined life of a country parson. It’s easy enough to see how such an interpretation makes sense in terms of Herbert’s life, but there are some of problems with it as well. For one, we don’t know when Herbert’s poems were actually written, and this, obviously enough, must temper one’s confidence in the straightforward biographical reading. After all, the poem could just as easily present a dramatic account of the tension between obedient faith and the desire for worldly pleasures that is a familiar dialectic in the lives of most religious persons.

A second note about the poem involves the overall form. Notice the crazy line lengths, rhyme patterns (or lack thereof) and disrupted meter in the opening lines of the poem. Everything here is disordered, chaotic—in just hearing the poem, it probably doesn’t really sound like poetry at all! But then listen to those last four lines once again:

But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde
                         At every word,
     Me thoughts I heard one calling, Childe:
                And I reply’d, My Lord.

True, the line lengths are still irregular. That said, there is now a distinctly regular iambic meter and the rhyme pattern (wilde – word – Childe – Lord) is a perfect ABAB quatrain. The point, of course, is that the language of the poem moves from a kind of verbal chaos to a more settled, more disciplined pulse, and this effect of the sound of the words works in the background to underscore and empower the transformative moment in the speaker’s narrative.

So that’s my take on “The Collar.” It’s a marvelous poem, even for those of us who aren’t necessarily religious. (After all, who hasn’t felt that tension between disciplined obedience and a longing for self-determination and freedom?). And, at least for a student of poetry, the poem is a superb example of the sort of formal and metrical ingenuity for which the Metaphysical poets like John Donne and George Herbert were famous.

As always, I’ll append another reading of the poem after the closing music in case you’d like to hear it again after this explication. Many thanks for listening, and I hope you’ll tune in again for the next episode of Influential Lyrics.

ETC…

Podcast Citation (MLA 9th ed.)

Grimes, Kyle. “George Herbert’s ‘The Collar.’” Influential Lyrics, hosted by Kyle Grimes, episode 1.5. April, 2025, https://influentiallyrics.com/2025/04/16/george-herberts-the-collar/

and finally…

Influential Lyrics podcast, 1.5, published April 2025

Influential Lyrics