![]() ![]() The poet craftsman is also in evidence: the rhyme scheme of the poem ends where it starts, so that the poem itself is a collar, enclosing him. ![]() The poem is striking in its sense of a living relationship with God, closest to a marriage, and in its direct and jagged expression of frustration. ‘The Collar’ dramatises a potential rebellion against this contemplative life in a witty play on the idea of the priest’s collar. After his death in 1633, his collection of poems, The Temple, was published in Cambridge and became an instant success. But it also expresses the conflict within him between the pleasures of the worldly life he might have had and the priestly duties he had now sworn to undertake. ![]() His poetry reflects his Anglicanism, with its emphasis on balance, neither Puritan at one extreme nor Catholic at the other (‘man well dressed’). Then his life changed direction: he took holy orders, married and later moved to be priest in the country parish of Bemerton, Wiltshire. ![]() He had great hopes of advancement both his predecessors had become Secretaries of State. He was a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge at the age of twenty two and later was appointed Orator for the university, which position brought him to the attention of the king. He was descended on his father’s side from the earls of Pembroke and on his mother’s from a family of Shropshire knights. George Herbert was born 3 April 1593 in Montgomery, Powys, Wales and died at the age of forty. ![]()
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