Herbert’s ‘The Collar’ and St Paul’s Laurels

IN George Herbert’s famous lyric ‘The Collar,’ the speaker in his rebellious frame of mind laments, ‘Is the yeare onely lost to me? / Have I no bayes to crown it?’ (13–14).1 In her edition of Herbert’s poems, Helen Wilcox annotates this passage with the comment, ‘A mixture of frustrated biblical-style expectation (Psalms lxv 11: “Thou crownest the year with thy goodness”) and failed hopes of poetic triumph symbolised in the classical laurel wreath.’2 Such ‘mixture’ is indeed highly plausible in the light of the speaker’s personal frustration, which commences with him striking the ‘board’ of the communion table, and continues in his subsequent itemization of the secular pursuits and worldly rewards he has been missing; even if such pursuits are ironically frequently expressed in terms of the religious devotion and self-sacrifice—the Eucharistic ‘wine’ and ‘corn’ (10–11)—that he apparently wishes to turn his back on. Surprisingly, however, such an ideological ‘mixture’ of Judeo-Christian and classical may be inherent simply in the Pauline context of the allusion to the crowning bays, if Herbert was deliberately echoing Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 9:24–25: ‘Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain. And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible.’3 Indeed, not only is Herbert’s The Temple as a whole symbolically a poetic response to 1 Corinthians—‘Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?’ (3:16)—but Wilcox notes an allusion to 1 Corinthians in the subsequent lines, ‘Not so, my heart: but there is fruit, / And thou hast hands’ (17–18). Challenging readers who might see this passage as simply a continuation of the single-minded voice of rebellion, Wilcox interestingly argues, ‘Clearly a second “voice” enters here, correcting the “heart” which has spoken so far’; she asserts, regarding the reference to ‘fruit’ and ‘hands’, that the ‘doubleness of reference continues into this second section of the poem. Here again the language implies both the fall (taking the fruit in one’s own hands) and the redemption (Christ the first-fruit, available to all who seek him; see 1 Corinthians xv 20).’4

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