George Herbert's metaphysical poem The Collar features the speaker narrating his struggle with what it means to serve his Lord. Herbert masterfully expresses the speaker's doubts in his faith and his feeling of being trapped by his priesthood through the use of religious metaphysical concepts. The nuanced tone, which changes at various points in the poem, is a key device that guides the speaker's argument and makes the poem's conclusion feel tremendously powerful. The use of retrospective and past tense is another poetic strategy used by Herbert that contributes to the great success of this poem as a whole. Herbert's best-known work, however, is not The Collar, but Easter Wings. Although they are both religious in subject matter, these are two very different poems. Easter Wings shows man's suffering and misery due to his sins, his redemption through God, and his salvation through devotion to God. While The Collar closes with direct references to God, Easter Wings opens with “The Lord , who created man in wealth and wealth” (1). The Collar is a much more personal poem than Easter Wings and it is that subjectivity and use of retrospective that makes it a powerful metaphysical poem. Easter Wings, on the other hand, is more generalized. For example, the lines "With thee/O Let me rise/Like larks, harmoniously", (6-8) Herbert describes man, not an individual, giving himself to God and declaring his devotion in the hope that it will still be a once able to thrive as it once did. Easter Wings also differs from The Collar in that it is a shaped poem, with the structure of the poem taking the shape of bird wings. Furthermore, The Collar makes use of violent free verse with rhyming elements to show the speaker's religious crisis, while E...... middle of paper ......f religious concepts alone make The Collar metaphysical. A fundamental aspect of Herbert's poetry that defines it as metaphysical is the role in which the personality of the speaker, or rather of the poet, is revealed. These lines show the speaker lamenting his life as “all wasted” (16) and lamenting the fact that he has achieved nothing praiseworthy and has not been congratulated on any success (“Have I no bays to crown it?” (14)) indicates that the speaker is someone with particularly delicate feelings. While undoubtedly angry at his plight, shown through diction such as "blasted" (15) and "wasted" (16), unlike the furious struggle of Donne's religious poetry (Wilmott, 9), Herbert's The Collar remains contained in the first sixteen lines, with an element of forced rationality as you would see in someone desperately trying to remain composed in an argument.