The Collar

Summary

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. The poem opens with a gesture: he strikes the board, a table that may be a dinner table or the Lord's table, cries No more, and announces that he will go abroad. Most of the poem is his tirade. He asks whether he must forever sigh and pine, insists that his lines and life are as free as the road and as loose as the wind, and complains that his only harvest is a thorn that draws his blood and gives nothing back. There was wine and corn, he says, before his sighs dried the one and his tears drowned the other; he has no bays or garlands to crown his lost year. Then he turns to his own heart and argues the case for leaving: there is fruit, and you have hands; stop the cold dispute about what is fit; the cage you live in is only a rope of sand that your petty thoughts have twisted into a cable. He tells himself to put away the death's head that reminds him of mortality and to tie up his fears. In the last four lines the rebellion breaks. As he raves more fiercely at every word, he seems to hear one calling Child, and he answers My Lord. Herbert builds the disorder into the verse: line lengths swing between three and ten syllables, rhymes fall at random intervals, and only the closing quatrain settles into regular alternating rhyme, so that the form submits along with the speaker. Readers have long heard puns in the title on the collar or yoke of a working animal, on choler or anger, and on the caller whose single word ends the quarrel.

Top Lessons

• Freedom is not the same as escape

  The speaker equates freedom with going abroad, as loose as the wind; the poem's ending shows him free only when he answers to the one who calls him. Herbert treats the rebellion with full sympathy and lets it speak at length before the single word that answers it.

• The shape of a heart in revolt

  The uneven line lengths and scattered rhymes are the speaker's disordered mind made visible, and the regular closing quatrain is order restored. Form here is not decoration but part of the poem's meaning.

• Sons, not slaves

  The speaker has been arguing as a servant who wants to be let go, but the voice calls him Childe. The ending changes the relationship he thought he was in, from a hired hand counting his wages to a son addressed by his father.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Herbert's images draw on the medicine of his day. The thorn that serves only to let blood and the cordial fruit that would restore what was lost set a useless bleeding beside a heart-strengthening remedy, both standard in seventeenth-century practice. The speaker's sighing, pining and tears belong to the period's language of melancholy, and the title is commonly read as including a pun on choler, the hot humor of anger, which the poem enacts as the speaker raves and grows more fierce. These are readings of imagery, not a portrait of illness.

• Lines 7-9

  The harvest of thorns that lets blood without restoring anything, set against cordial fruit.

• Lines 3 and 10-12

  The speaker's sighing and pining, and the sighs and tears that have dried his wine and drowned his corn.

• Title and lines 33-34

  The likely pun on choler and the speaker's mounting rage just before the call.