"The Collar" by George Herbert - Biography and Analysis
In George Herbert 's poem "The Collar," published in The Temple (1633), the author/persona rebels against the casuistry that the Christian life imposes, only to be brought back finally into childlike submission when he hears (or thinks he hears) the "Lord 's" gentle rebuke. My argument is that, astoundingly, the poem 's elaborate, random-seeming rhyme scheme--itself "collar-like" because it edges the poem--encodes witty messages that force us to rethink the poem 's meaning, especially its serious tone.[1]
The discovery explicated here belongs originally to Cary Ader, a Miami-Dade Community College student who proposed it in 1992 to his professor, Norbert Artzt, who passed it on to me because he knew of my investigations into runic embeddings and "suppressed design" in earlier literature. In brief, Ader detected that if one uses conventional alphabetic analysis the complex rhyme scheme of the poem ends with a "NO NO!" that sounds like a playful echo of (and gloss on) the Lord 's sotto voce reprimand in the last lines of the text itself. My main contributions to Ader 's findings are to propose that a second, concurrent rhyme scheme--inherent in the ambiguous phonics of the poem 's endwords--yields further communication, and that the two letter codes themselves convey complex runic meanings, not just quippy one-liners.
Ader 's analysis of the poem 's rhyme scheme appears, (see poem page 74) in column A, mine in column B. The divergence arises from ambiguous rhyming relationships between endwords suit/fruit/dispute (lines 6, 9, 20) and drown it/crown it (12,14). As Ader correctly recognized, these endword sound groups are phonically remote; still, their "disputable" eye-rhyme linkage does permit my alternative construction. If allowed, the B rhyme scheme generates a terminal "MN MN"--a phonic string that puns insistently on "Amen! Amen!" Because "amens" conventionally close and underscore messages, these are inarguably relevant to Preacher Herbert 's verse text.
To
The discovery explicated here belongs originally to Cary Ader, a Miami-Dade Community College student who proposed it in 1992 to his professor, Norbert Artzt, who passed it on to me because he knew of my investigations into runic embeddings and "suppressed design" in earlier literature. In brief, Ader detected that if one uses conventional alphabetic analysis the complex rhyme scheme of the poem ends with a "NO NO!" that sounds like a playful echo of (and gloss on) the Lord 's sotto voce reprimand in the last lines of the text itself. My main contributions to Ader 's findings are to propose that a second, concurrent rhyme scheme--inherent in the ambiguous phonics of the poem 's endwords--yields further communication, and that the two letter codes themselves convey complex runic meanings, not just quippy one-liners.
Ader 's analysis of the poem 's rhyme scheme appears, (see poem page 74) in column A, mine in column B. The divergence arises from ambiguous rhyming relationships between endwords suit/fruit/dispute (lines 6, 9, 20) and drown it/crown it (12,14). As Ader correctly recognized, these endword sound groups are phonically remote; still, their "disputable" eye-rhyme linkage does permit my alternative construction. If allowed, the B rhyme scheme generates a terminal "MN MN"--a phonic string that puns insistently on "Amen! Amen!" Because "amens" conventionally close and underscore messages, these are inarguably relevant to Preacher Herbert 's verse text.
To