“The Collar” Introduction

• The British poet George Herbert first published "The Collar" in his famous 1633 collection of devotional verse, The Temple. In this autobiographical poem, a clergyman rages against all the limitations of religious life, longing for freedom and pleasure rather than duty and endless, guilt-ridden self-scrutiny. But no matter how much he struggles, he just can't get around two facts: God exists, and he has a calling to serve his "Lord." Religious faith, this poem suggests, can feel more like a burden than a consolation—but that doesn't mean one can run from it.

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“The Collar” Summary

• I pounded the table, and shouted, "That's it! I'm leaving! Am I meant to sit around feeling bad forever? I can do what I please: my life is free as the open road, wandering as the wind, and overflowing with possibilities. So why should I behave like a servant? Do I get any rewards besides stabs of guilt and sorrow, with no refreshing pleasures in return? I know that I used to relish wine before I dried it all up with my heavy sighs, that I ate fresh bread before I soaked it in my tears. And am I the only person who doesn't get to have any fun this year? Has this stretch of time earned me no celebratory bouquets, no triumphant crowns of laurels, no beautiful wreaths to honor my brilliance? Are those all faded and withered away? Absolutely not, old boy: pleasure still exists, and you can go out and grab it. Make up for your long years of guilt and suffering by enjoying yourself twice as much: stop fretting about morality all the time. Give up this false cage, this fake net you've made for yourself out of your own thoughts. Those "ropes" have worked pretty well to force you to obey all the moral rules you made up; you refused to see that they were all your own inventions, not real laws. I said that's it! You listen to me! I'm getting out of here. Call off that menacing skull that's meant to remind me of death; lock your fears away. It's the people who don't do exactly what they want who deserve the burdens of guilt and duty." But the longer I ranted and raved like this, the more I thought I could hear a voice calling to me. It said "Child!" and I answered, "My Lord."

“The Collar” Themes

• 

  The Weight of Faith

  The speaker in George Herbert’s “The Collar” feels collared both literally and metaphorically: he’s a priest wearing the traditional white “dog collar,” and he can’t escape the demands of his Christian faith. Feeling weighed down by his duties and his conscience, he longs to do whatever he wants without his religious scruples tapping him on the shoulder—or, at the very least, to be rewarded for all the sacrifices he makes for his religion. In his frustration, he even starts to convince himself that his beliefs are just an illusory “cage” he’s built from his own “thoughts.” But the more he struggles to be free, the more he hears God summoning him back. Religious faith (and religious callings), this poem suggests, can feel like a heavy and unrewarding burden—but ultimately, God just can’t be ignored.

  Faith, the poem suggests, can feel restrictive, and its rewards aren’t always clear. Fed up with agonizing over “what is fit and not” (that is, what’s morally correct), the speaker longs to throw off all his scruples and live a life as “free as the road.” His priestly responsibilities and his intense moral self-examination have left him pierced through with “thorn[s]” of guilt and suffering—suffering that God doesn’t seem to honor with compensatory pleasures. The speaker feels he’s enduring all the pains of sacrifice, guilt, and confinement without a touch of joy to sweeten the deal. Meanwhile, plenty of other people seem to go about their lives blithely doing what they will; in a moment of self-pity, the speaker wonders if it’s only he who has to be so good all the time.

  When faith seems to offer no consolations, the poem goes on, it’s easy for dissatisfaction to turn to doubt. Longing for the “pleasures” of a life without religious duty, the speaker starts to talk himself into the idea that his faith was only ever a “rope of sands” anyway—an apparently tight snare that would actually be easy to shake. Perhaps, he thinks, the priestly “collar” he wears is made only from his “thoughts”—and if he tore it off, he could embrace the “double pleasures” of a hedonistic life without a burdensome conscience.

  But God, the poem concludes, can’t be escaped so easily as a “rope of sands.” Right in the midst of his “fierce,” “wild” rebellion, the speaker hears God calling, “Child,” and finds himself answering, “My Lord.” Faith, the poem thus suggests, isn’t just a “rope of sands,” a net of thoughts that entraps people too weak to strike out on their own. It’s a response to an inescapable fact: the speaker ultimately has to admit that God exists and must be obeyed, whether he likes it or not.

  That doesn’t mean that faith is simple. If the speaker acknowledges that he’s a “child” of God, he’ll also have to accept that God doesn’t choose to give him a freewheeling and pleasurable life (at least not at the moment). But then, the very fact that God calls the speaker “child” also suggests that God is a loving parent with the speaker’s best interests in mind, even if the speaker can’t always see how. Faith, especially the kind of faith that calls people to priesthood, might often be heavy, and it’s no guarantee of an easy life—just the opposite. But for this speaker, it’s also a truth that one has to accept.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Collar”

• Lines 1-5

  I struck the board, and cried, "No more;
                           I will abroad!
  What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
  My lines and life are free, free as the road,
  Loose as the wind, as large as store.

  "The Collar" begins with a literal bang. The speaker, fed up, smacks the "board" (that is, the table) at which he sits and declares that he's not going to take this anymore: he's going to give up his pious, do-gooding life as a priest and hit the road, living only for pleasure.

  He doesn't actually tell readers he's a priest; the poem's title does that job for him. The "Collar" here has both a straightforward and a metaphorical meaning:

  • It's a literal clerical collar, the traditional white neckband of Christian clergymen.
  • But it's also a figurative restraint, a set of beliefs that holds the speaker back from doing just what he likes.

  As the poem begins, then, the speaker seems like a dog about to snap his leash and chase all the pigeons his heart desires. He's tired of sitting around being responsible and feeling guilty, always "sigh[ing] and pin[ing]" over his many sins. He'd rather live a life as "free as the road."

  Listen to the ways he repeats himself as he says so:

  My lines and life are free, free as the road,
  Loose as the wind, as large as store.

  His epizeuxis on the word "free" here makes him sound wild with rebellious anger: You can't make me stay, I'm free, free! And the parallelism of all those similar phrasings sets up a linked series of revealing similes:

  • If the speaker wants to live a life as "free as the road," he wants to follow his nose wherever he likes, no longer bound to his duty, his parish, or his church.
  • If he wants to be "loose as the wind," he also wants to be uncontainable: to be unrestrained by laws and rules.
  • And if he wants to live a life as "large as store," then he wants to feel that the world is as full of possibilities as a well-stocked larder is with treats—and perhaps to make up for lost time with a stored-up feast of pleasures.

  In other words, this clergyman (whose circumstances sound an awful lot like those of his author, George Herbert) seems ready to make like a 20th-century hippie—or a pre-Christian Epicurean, for that matter. He wants to put his own desires and his own pleasure first. And his poetry, his "lines," should reflect that freewheeling energy.

  But already, the poem hints that pursuing a life of self-centered pleasure might not be as simple as getting up and leaving. Listen to the speaker's rhetorical question here:

  What? shall I ever sigh and pine?

  The intended unspoken answer is: No, I will NOT "sigh and pine" over my sins forever, that's ridiculous and I won't do it. But it's not so easy to run away from guilt and sorrow: wherever the speaker goes, there he and his feelings will be. Religious faith, this poem will suggest, isn't something a person can just shake off like a loose leash, no matter how fed up they are.

  That doesn't mean the speaker isn't having a serious fit of rage and doubt. The titular "collar" might also pun on "choler," or anger, an emotion that the speaker is going to vent in most of this poem's 36 unpredictable lines.

• Lines 6-9

            Shall I be still in suit?
  Have I no harvest but a thorn
  To let me blood, and not restore
  What I have lost with cordial fruit?

  

  

• Lines 10-12

            Sure there was wine
  Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn
      Before my tears did drown it.

  

  

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• Lines 13-16

        Is the year only lost to me?
            Have I no bays to crown it,
  No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
                    All wasted?

  

  

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• Lines 17-21

  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.

  

  

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• Lines 21-26

  Forsake thy cage,
               Thy rope of sands,
  Which petty 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.

  

  

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• Lines 27-32

  Away! take heed;
            I will abroad.
  Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears;
            He that forbears
           To suit and serve his need
            Deserves his load."

  

  

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• Lines 33-36

  But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
            At every word,
  Methought I heard one calling, 
  Child!
            And I replied 
  My Lord.

  

  

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“The Collar” Symbols

• 

  Packing up the "Death's-Head"

  The "death's-head," or skull, that appears in line 29 is a straightforward symbol of death. Thus, when the speaker admonishes himself to pack up his "death's-head," he's also trying to convince himself not to worry so much about the life to come (i.e., in Heaven or Hell) and to live for pleasure instead.

  Lots of Renaissance art and literature used images of skulls to remind people that life was short and pleasure fleeting. Keeping a skull around, the idea went, was a good way to remind yourself that you shouldn't get too distracted by all the fun you can have on earth: it's more important to keep your eyes fixed on the joys (or horrors!) of the afterlife.

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• 

  Plants, Fruits, and Flowers

  The poem's images of plants, fruits, and flowers have a wealth of symbolic meanings. Besides drawing on traditional Christian images of sacrifice, suffering, and redemption, they represent the speaker's longing for earthly rewards and poetic glory.

  When the speaker bemoans the fact that, all through his pious life, he's harvested "thorns" but no "fruit," he's playing on two old symbols:

  • Besides representing pain and suffering (for obvious reasons!), thorns evoke the tormenting Crown of Thorns that Christ wore at the Crucifixion. They thus symbolize not just pain, but pain that mysteriously transforms into glory.
  • Fruit, meanwhile, is an ancient image of pleasurable rewards—as in "seeing the fruits of your labors."

  The symbolic thorns of suffering and self-sacrifice, the poem hints, bear fruit in the afterlife, not on earth—but the speaker is in no mood to hear that right now. He'd rather go out and grab earthly fruits in his own two "hands."

  Another of the poem's harvests is similarly symbolic:

  • The "wine" and "corn" (which here means wheat, not corn on the cob) that the speaker remembers enjoying once are more bits of good old-fashioned harvest symbolism: they both suggest fertility, abundance, celebration, and the rewards of one's labors.
  • But they're also pointedly Christian: bread and wine are the foods of the Last Supper and the communion table, embodiments of Christ's body and blood.

  Once again, in the midst of his tantrum, the speaker wants the earthly versions of these symbolic rewards rather than the heavenly ones—but the heavenly versions hover in the background.

  Meanwhile, the "bays," "flowers," and "garlands" in lines 14-16 symbolize victory, glory, and pleasure. Those "bays" are worth particular attention: the bay tree, also known as the laurel, was a traditional symbol of poetic victory. Great poets, in the classical world, were sometimes crowned with laurel leaves—a tradition that echoes today in the term "poet laureate." Complaining that he has no "bays," this speaker suggests that he'd have liked a little more recognition for his poetry, not just for his good deeds!

  The "flowers" and "garlands," meanwhile, also suggest glory: one might use such decorations to adorn a great artist in a triumphal parade. But they also suggest plain old pleasure. Flowers are a common symbol of love, hope, and new life; in longing for flowers, the speaker might be longing for the lost "springtime" of his youth, too.

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“The Collar” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Conceit

  "The Collar" is built around the conceit of, well, the "collar": the clerical "dog collar" the speaker wears becomes a metaphor for the inescapable clutches of sincere religious faith.

  If the speaker wears a clerical collar, he's a Christian priest: a guy who has devoted his whole life to faithful service. As the poem begins, he's fed up with all the sacrifices this career has demanded of him. Rather than living the life of a famous poet crowned with the "bays" (or laurel wreath) of artistic glory, the speaker feels he's stuck "in suit," a mere servant. Worse, he has to spend most of his time "sigh[ing] and pin[ing]" over his sins, dithering over "what is fit and not," obsessing about moral dilemmas.

  In this sense, then, his clerical collar is a metaphorical restraint, a thing that holds him back from leading a free-and-easy life of hedonistic pleasure. Like a dog on a leash, he feels prevented from jumping impulsively after the squirrels of possibility.

  But even as he rants and raves, threatening to abandon not just his priesthood but his religious faith itself, a single word from God stops him in his tracks: all God has to say is "Child!" for the speaker to answer, almost reflexively, "My Lord." It isn't so easy to slip the "collar" of faith, the poem suggests—and that collar's restraints might be meant more to keep believers from running into spiritual traffic than to deny them all the squirrels they can eat.

  That's true not just for priests, the poem hints, but for all Christian believers. Perhaps, then, this collar is also meant to evoke the light, easy "yoke" in a famous biblical parable. Faith might feel heavy sometimes, the speaker suggests, but it's a lighter burden than sin.

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• Pun

  

  
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• Metaphor

  

  

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• Simile

  

  

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• Allusion

  

  

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• Rhetorical Question

  

  

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• Parallelism

  

  

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• Repetition

  

  

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• Enjambment

  

  

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• Assonance

  

  

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• Alliteration

  

  

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"The Collar" Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Board
• I will abroad
• Pine
• My lines and life
• As large as store
• In suit
• Cordial
• Sure
• Corn
• Bays
• Garlands gay
• Blasted
• Thou
• Thy
• Sigh-blown
• Cold dispute
• What is fit and not
• Forsake
• Rope of sands
• Cable
• Enforce and draw
• While thou didst wink and wouldst not see
• Death's-head
• Forbears
• Raved
• Methought

• A table—though here, it's also possible that the speaker means the altar of his church!

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Collar”

• Form

  "The Collar" invents its own form to tell its tale of rebellion and resignation. The poem is built from one long, irregular stanza. Lines of different lengths give the poem a bristly look even before one starts reading the speaker's bristly complaints.

  The lack of stanza breaks here makes the poem feel like one big outburst. And much of it is in the form of an outburst, too: in lines 1-32, the speaker quotes his own tirade against the duties and burdens of his Christian faith and his priesthood. But after that long passage of invective ends, the last four lines of the poem turn into a dialogue: God calls to the speaker, and before he even knows what he's doing, the speaker answers.

  This movement from long, angry rant to simple, brief call-and-response makes it clear that human rage pales in comparison to the power of a single word from God.

• Meter

  "The Collar" uses a jolting, irregular meter to capture the speaker's rebellious rage. While the poem is roughly iambic—that is, it's built from iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm—the line lengths are all over the place, evoking spasms of fury. And, as in a lot of iambic verse, the feet dance around, too: the speaker often throws in a trochee (the opposite of an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm) or even a spondee (a foot with two punchy stresses in a row, DUM-DUM) for emphasis.

  For instance, listen to the first two lines:

  I struck | the board, | and cried, | "No more;
  I will | abroad!

  The first line seems as if it's going to be in straightforward iambic tetrameter (four iambs in a row)—but then breaks that pattern with the powerful spondee of "No more." The short second line, in iambic dimeter (just two iambs), feels curt and clipped: I'm done, and that's final, the speaker seems to say. Abrupt metrical changes like these make most of the poem sound downright furious.

  But listen to what happens in the poem's closing lines:

  But as | I raved | and grew | more fierce | and wild
  At ev- | ery word,
  Methought | I heard | one cal- | ling, Child!
  And I | replied, | My Lord.

  As the speaker responds to God's summons, the meter slows and settles. While the lines still aren't quite regular here (moving from pentameter/dimeter to tetrameter/trimeter), readers will notice that they feel oddly regular, read aloud. That's because:

  • These lines are written in steady, pulsing iambs, without variations.
  • And lines 33-34 and 35-36, each a complete thought, both use seven iambs in total—just divided differently between lines.

  As the poem ends, the changing meter makes it sound as if the speaker is finally resigning himself to his fate, reaching an accepting and even humble state of mind.

• Rhyme Scheme

  The rhyme scheme in "The Collar" is as prickly and combative as the speaker. The poem uses plenty of rhyme, but it doesn't follow any steady, predictable pattern.

  For instance, a rhyme that first appears in line 3 ("pine") disappears for a long spell, only to pop up again all the way down in line 10 ("wine"). Rhymes sometimes weave in and out of each other, and sometimes hit two in a row, as in "blasted"/"wasted" in lines 15-16. (That sounds like a slant rhyme now, but in Herbert's Renaissance-era English, it might well have felt close to perfect.)

  Only at the very end of the poem do the rhymes take on a familiar form. The last four lines, in which the speaker responds to God's call, run like this:

  ABAB

  (Note that this is another situation in which a rhyme that sounds slant now, "word"/"Lord," might well have sounded firmer in Herbert's accent.)

  The poem's rhymes thus reflect the poem's ideas. The lives of the faithful might often feel nonsensically unfair, burdensome, and chaotic, the rhyme scheme suggests, but that doesn't mean that God's plan isn't still at work beneath it all.

“The Collar” Speaker

• The speaker of "The Collar," like the speaker in a lot of George Herbert's poems, has much in common with Herbert himself. Like his author, this speaker is a passionate, moody clergyman. And he's fed up with being so good all the time for what seem to be no earthly rewards. Once, he remembers, he got to enjoy the metaphorical "wine" and "corn" (or wheat) of pleasure, rather than feeling bound to dull and burdensome duty all the time. But even the metaphors he chooses suggest he knows, deep down, that for him there's no escaping God: wine and wheat themselves are sacramental materials, the sacred foods that priests offer up on the communion table. This priest might sometimes wish he could escape his religious faith, but for him, it's a matter as fundamental as eating.

“The Collar” Setting

• There's no clear setting in this poem: aside from the "board" (or table) that the poem's speaker smacks in frustration in the first line, the poem's events could take place anywhere. But that one little detail hints that the speaker is sitting at home, perhaps at his own kitchen table, fuming over how much his life as a priest demands from him and how little joy it's currently giving him in return. The line might even suggest the speaker is so fed up that he's pounding the altar—the table upon which Christian priests perform their rites.

  In the course of his angry "rav[ing]" against his religious duties, the speaker conjures a picture of the "free" and open "road": perhaps his frustration at his inner predicament also reflects a weariness with staying at home, bound to one church and one parish. Readers might well imagine that this speaker (who's almost certainly a voice for Herbert himself) also lives in surroundings like Herbert's, serving a little church in an out-of-the-way country town.

Literary and Historical Context of “The Collar”

• Literary Context

  George Herbert (1593-1633) had more than a little in common with the speaker of this poem. A passionate, poetic soul, Herbert lived a humble life as a country priest, serving a small English parish that bore the exuberant name of Fuggleston-cum-Bemerton. Herbert, born a nobleman and raised a brilliant scholar, often struggled with the limitations his calling imposed on his life; he could easily have made a splash in a royal court, but he felt inexorably drawn to the priesthood.

  While he was never crowned with the "bays" of public poetic success during his short lifetime, Herbert is now remembered as one of the foremost of the "Metaphysical Poets." This group of 17th-century writers, which included poets like John Donne and Andrew Marvell, shared a combination of brilliant intellect, passionate feeling, and religious fervor. Herbert was not the only one of these poets to work as a clergyman, or to explore his relationship with God in poems that sometimes sound more like love songs than hymns.

  The Temple (1633) was Herbert's only poetry collection, and it might never have seen the light of day. On his deathbed at the age of only 39, Herbert left the book's manuscript to his friend Nicholas Farrar, telling him to publish it if he felt it would do some "dejected poor soul" some good. Farrar, suspecting it would, brought to press what would become one of the world's best-known and best-loved books of poetry. The Temple would become a major influence on later poets from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to T.S. Eliot to Wendy Cope.

  Historical Context

  During his short life, George Herbert saw Britain moving from a golden age of power and prosperity into an unsettled (and unsettling) era of change. Herbert was born under the reign of Elizabeth I, a queen who presided over a time of both military and artistic glory: she was a famous patron of writers like Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marlowe. But, true to her image as a goddess-like "Virgin Queen," Elizabeth died unmarried and without children.

  Next in line to the throne was James VI and I of Scotland and England, Elizabeth's distant cousin. A largely competent and thoughtful king, he was nonetheless a less awe-inspiring and more divisive figure than his predecessor, to the point that a group of conspirators (including the infamous Guy Fawkes) tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament while he was in them.

  This kind of unrest would eventually swell into outright insurrection. By 1633, when Herbert died, James's son Charles I had ascended to the throne—but not for long. In 1649, he would be not just dethroned but decapitated. A group of rebels led by Oliver Cromwell overthrew the monarchy, chopped Charles's head off, chased his son into exile in France, and declared a republic (though it ended up being more of a short-lived dictatorship). In the ensuing chaos, England was nearly destroyed by civil war.

  While Herbert died before that time of bloodshed began, he lived to feel the rumbles of one of the most tumultuous periods in English history.

More “The Collar” Resources

• External Resources

  • Herbert in Bemerton — Visit a website dedicated to Herbert and the church where he lived and worked.

  • The Temple — Learn more about The Temple, Herbert's famous posthumous poetry collection.

  • Herbert's Legacy — Read author Wendy Cope on Herbert's lasting importance.

  • A Short Biography — Visit the Poetry Foundation to learn more about Herbert's life.

  • The Poem Aloud — Listen to Prof. Iain McGilchrist performing the poem.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by George Herbert

  • Easter Wings

  • Love (III)

  • Redemption

  • The Altar

  • The Flower

  • The Pulley