The Collar

George Herbert’s metaphysical poem The Collar shows the speaker narrating his struggle with what it means to serve his Lord. Herbert masterfully expresses the speaker’s doubt in his faith and his feeling of being trapped by his priesthood through use of religious metaphysical conceits. The nuanced tone, which changes at various points in the poem, is a key device that drives the speaker’s argument and results in the conclusion of the poem being tremendously powerful. The use of retrospect and the past tense is another poetic strategy used by Herbert that contributes to the great success of this poem as a whole.

The most well known work of Herbert is however not The Collar, but Easter Wings. While they are both religious in subject matter, these are two very different poems. Easter Wings shows man’s suffering and misery due to his sins and his redemption through God and his salvation through devotion to God. While The Collar closes with direct references to God, Easter Wings opens with “ Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store” (1). The Collar is a far more personal poem than Easter Wings and it is that subjectivity and use of retrospect that makes it a powerful metaphysical poem. Easter Wings on the other hand is more generalized. For example, the lines “With thee/O Let me rise/As larks, harmoniously,” (6-8) Herbert describes man, not an individual, giving himself to God and declaring his devotion in the hope that he will once more be able to flourish as he once did. Easter Wings also differs from The Collar in that it is a shaped poem, with the structure of the poem taking the form of bird’s wings. Furthermore, The Collar makes use of violent free verse with rhyming elements to show the speaker’s religious crisis, whereas E...

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...f religious conceits alone that makes The Collar metaphysical. A seminal aspect of Herbert’s poetry that defines it as metaphysical is the role that the speaker, or rather the poet’s, personality is revealed. These lines that show the speaker lamenting his life as “all wasted” (16) and bemoaning the fact that he has achieved nothing praiseworthy and has not been congratulated on any successes (“Have I no bays to crown it?” (14)) indicates that the speaker is someone of particularly fine feelings. While he is undoubtedly angry at his plight, shown through diction such as “blasted” (15) and “wasted” (16), unlike the raging struggle of Donne’s religious poetry (Wilmott, 9), Herbert’s The Collar remains restrained in the first sixteen lines, with an element of forced rationality as one would see in someone who is desperately trying to remain composed in an argument.