"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.