The Necessity of Poetic Experimentation

On the surface of George Herberts lyric poem The Collar, the frustrated speaker craves
independence from the confinement of his clerical life. Upon close reading, the poem implicates
an argument for poetic experimentation. Herbert portrays a poem that, much like the speaker,
yearns for freedom yet is confined by the traditional conventions of poetry. The history of poetic
tradition relies on experimentation, and the poem reflects the need to stray from conventions.
Through rhyme scheme, structure, and an ironic title, The Collar establishes a parallel
relationship between the speaker of the poem and the poem itself.
Unlike traditional poems, there is no real rhyme scheme employed until the last four lines
of The Collar. All of the lines have an eventual rhyming pair; however, there is no pattern as to
when they appear in the poem. For example, My life and lines are free, free as the road, / Loose
as the wind, as large as store. / Shall I be still in suit? (4-6). The simile sequence in the poem
emphasizes the unlimited freedom the speaker has. These particular lines not only portray the
speakers independence, but the faulty rhyme scheme also reflects the poems freedom from a
traditional rhyme scheme. After claiming his independence, he rhetorically poses the question of
whether or not he is allowed to be in suit, meaning conventionally appropriate, while
simultaneously being free. As Ramie Targoff states, To be out of suit with God is precisely to
be out of poetic discipline (102). The relationship between the speakers religious freedom and
texts poetic freedom is parallel, and this correspondence continues into the last four lines of the
poem. When the rhyme scheme transitions back to the traditional ABAB pattern, the speaker also
succumbs to a call from the Lord.

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The Collars overall structure also mirrors the concept of freedom the speaker is
portraying: The speakers anger about his obligations to God and the churchis poetically
enforced by the irregular nature of his verse (Targoff 101). Although majority of the poem is
written in iambs, there is no set pattern to how many metrical feet make up each line. The
number of iambs varies in each line; several lines are loaded with inverted feet while others are
missing syllables at the end. Once again, the line that reads My life and lines are free, free as the
road ends with an inverted foot, emphasizing both the speakers and the poems freedom
simultaneously. However, there is an overall change in the structure of the last quatrain of the
text that imitates the speakers submission to Gods call.
Throughout The Collar, the speaker reveals his inner conflict with following Gods will
and spends almost the entire poem ranting about his need to be free of clerical duties.
Nevertheless, the stubborn speaker finally accepts his call from the Lord: Until the speaker
recognizes the inner call of Child, he remains bitter, angry, rebellious, and choleric (Roberts
198). The metrical structure of the poem mirrors this sudden change in the speakers attitude.
Despite the strange patterns of metric feet scattered throughout the text, the poem ends with
perfect iambic meter. Targoff explains that the meter Herbert adopts in these last two lines, a
meter that the poem otherwise somewhat conspicuously avoids, is none other than the
fourteeners so familiar to English congregations from the Psalms of Sternhold-Hopkins (102).
This arrangement emulates his complete submission to God and his willingness to accept all
that is implied by that submission (Roberts 198). Just as the speaker submits to the will of God,
the poem submits to the traditional organization of literary elements.
Contrarily to other traditional poems written during this time, The Collar employs a
conversational tone that serves well to reflect the sudden passion the speaker wants to express.

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Like Rodney Edgecombe claims, It is clear that informal syntax can serve a passionate,
anguished tone as well as a firm one (101). Engaging in a conversational tone as opposed to a
formal one brings the poem down to a relatable level. The series of rhetorical questions strung
together also highlights his frantically expressed ideas (146). The speaker is unable to collect
his thoughts eloquently because he is freely speaking his mind. This unstructured rant rings with
authenticity that might have been otherwise lacking if the poem were written in a conventional
structure. The appearance of the poem on the page also reflects the speakers rebellious tone.
While every line of a traditional poem begins on the left margin, the beginning of the lines in The
Collar are scattered. There is also no separation of stanzas, which contributes to the randomness
of his free flowing outburst. While the literary elements employed are explicitly at work
emulating the speakers tone, the title is ambiguously functioning in the poem.
One might assume the title is irrelevant because it is not mentioned anywhere in the
poem. However, as Dale Randall states, the metaphorical implications of a Herbert title should
never be minimized (473). Roberts considers the title to be an emblematic image that informs
our understanding of the whole poem (197). The title The Collar mocks the poem as a whole,
implying a sort of restraint the speaker has on or feels. Randall goes on to discuss several
interpretations of the title that are actively at work in the poem, two of which are caller and
choler as puns on a base word (476). In seventeenth-century English, the words caller and
choler were pronounced very similarly to collar, which explains why literary critics easily
associate the terms with each other (Roberts 197-98).
The pun caller obviously originates from the volta in the poem. The speaker receives a
call from the Lord, leading to his submissiveness at the close. In contrast to the rest of the poem,
the final four lines portray a new attitude in the speaker in which he recognizes his true calling,

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not as a servant of the Lord but as one of his children. Randall also suggests the call here
gently admonishes the speaker not merely of Gods fatherhood but of his own wayward
childishness (477). While the speaker wishes to be free of his clerical collar, he cannot shake his
childlike dependency on the Lord.
Throughout the poem, the collar can be seen as one that restricts the speakers
freedom, which is what ultimately sparks his need express his feelings through this poem: Not
only is the form choler itself an obsolete variant of collar, but The Collar may be readily and
comfortably viewed as the narrative of a choleric mans outburst (Randall 477). The structure
and tone of the poem both support this interpretation; the speaker rants in its entirety about how
he has had enough. Just as he feels trapped by his collar, the poem too feels trapped by
traditional conventions. The chaotic structure of this poem reflects the urge to stray from the
traditional; he is trying to break free from this collar. However, the speaker accepts this collar as
a guiding one at the end of the poem, much like the poem itself accepts tradition and is guided by
standard poetic conventions of rhyme and meter after the volta.
While the surface narrative of the poem presents an unfulfilled clergyman ready to
dispose of his clerical collar, The Collar exploits several literary devices in order to make a
subliminal argument about the need for poetic experimentation. The need to forsake thy cage
through experimenting with new forms of is crucial to the evolution of poetry (21). Strictly
following traditions is debilitating, and creativity becomes a lost art. Just as the speaker wants to
be unrestricted by his religious duties, the structure of the poem itself imitates the speakers
feeling of rebellion that ultimately ends with dependency.

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Works Cited
Edgecombe, Rodney. Sweetneses Readie Penn'D: Imagery, Syntax and Metrics in the Poetry of
George Herbert. Ed. Dr. James Hogg. Austria: Universitt Salzburg, 1980. Print.
Herbert, George. The Collar. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and M. H. Abrams. The Norton
Anthology of English Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. 902. Print.
Randall, Dale B.J. "The Ironing Of George Herbert's 'Collar.'" Studies In Philology 81.4 (1984):
473. Academic Search Complete. Web. 19 Apr. 2015.
Roberts, John R. "Me Thoughts I Heard One Calling, Child!": Herbert's "The Collar."
Renascence 45.3 (1993): 197-204. Academic Search Complete. Web. 20 Apr. 2015.
Targoff, Ramie. Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. Print.