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.
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?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays to crown it,
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
All wasted?
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. 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.
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.”
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, Child!
And I replied My Lord.
Text from Poetry Foundation.
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I taught this poem for many years. I was intrigued by how Herbert, from the words “Not so my heart”, designs a doubleness to what follows. The threat to leave the Church reads simultaneously as an invitation from God to return to the bosom of the church. As the speaker says: “at every word.” Out of his own angry words does God reveal himself.
The five ways of taking the title are also a delightful demonstration of Herbert’s ingenious art.
It seems wrong to spoil such a beautiful poem with commentary, but you might like to note the following from the footnotes in the 1974 Everyman edition of Herbert’s poems: “The title refers not to the modern clerical collar but to the common figurative expression ‘to slip the collar’. It may even be a nautical term… A pun may be intended in collar/choler.”
To expand on my earlier remark:
The collar is (or, if you prefer, can be) clerical, it is a dog’s collar, it is the anger the speaker feels (choler), it is the speaker as a caller, and it is God the caller answering back through the speaker’s own anger. Those metaphysicals were a cagey bunch.