Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Herrick

Herrick’s couplet is a trapdoor disguised as moral advice: it pretends to praise “love” while really indicting the appetite for servitude. The diction does the work. “Bonds,” “broke,” “submits,” “neck,” “yoke” are not romantic nouns; they’re the language of animals, punishment, and labor. By opening with “He loves,” Herrick borrows the grammar of devotion, then poisons it with coercion. The shock is the point: if you willingly trade one restraint for another after being freed, the problem isn’t merely the captor. It’s the seduction of captivity itself.

The subtext reads like a cool, Anglican-era diagnosis of human psychology: people habituate to constraint. Freedom can feel like exposure; a “yoke” is at least a structure you understand. Herrick’s rhyme (“broke” / “yoke”) also suggests a grim inevitability, as if liberation naturally seeks its own replacement. It’s wit with teeth, the kind that doesn’t need a sermon because the metaphor already humiliates the willing subject.

Context matters. Writing in 17th-century England, Herrick lived through political and religious upheaval, when allegiance, conformity, and “submission” were not abstract themes but daily pressures. The line can be read as a warning against returning to oppressive authority after a rupture - political, spiritual, or intimate. It’s also personal: a poet of pleasure reminding readers that desire can masquerade as choice while tightening into habit. Herrick isn’t asking why chains exist; he’s asking why we keep putting them back on.