1593-1633 · Welsh-born English poet and country priest, author of The Temple
About George Herbert
George Herbert (1593-1633) was a Welsh-born English poet and priest, Public Orator of Cambridge University and briefly a member of Parliament before he took holy orders. From 1630 he served as rector of Bemerton near Salisbury, where he died in March 1633. His religious lyrics, collected as The Temple and published that year by his friend Nicholas Ferrar, are among the finest devotional poems in English.
The Collar is a 36-line lyric from George Herbert's The Temple, the book of religious poems published in 1633, a few months after his death. Its speaker, a man bound to God's service and often read as a priest like Herbert himself, rises in revolt against that service.