Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Herrick

Desire is pitched here not as appetite but as a chain. Herrick’s line turns the moral microscope away from tyrants and onto the self: the person who “covets more” manufactures their own captivity, because wanting becomes a job you can never clock out of. The phrasing is tight and judicial. “Covets” isn’t neutral craving; it’s acquisitive longing with a biblical shadow (the Ten Commandments’ warning against coveting your neighbor’s goods). Herrick smuggles a whole ethical tradition into a single verb, then seals it with the grim drumbeat of “evermore”: this isn’t a bad week, it’s a life sentence.

The subtext lands cleanly in 17th-century England, where social rank was sticky, money was newly mobile, and consumer pleasures were getting louder. Herrick, a Cavalier poet with a taste for sensuality and brevity, often plays both sides of the ledger: he can toast pleasure and still insist on limits. That tension is what gives the line bite. It isn’t Puritan hair-shirt scolding; it’s a warning about the psychic costs of escalation. “More” is deliberately vague because the trap is portable: wealth, status, admiration, even virtue can become addictive currencies.

Calling the covetous “a slave” is also a rhetorical shove. Slavery is the extreme image of unfreedom, so the line forces a reassessment of what counts as liberty. You can be socially free and internally owned. Herrick’s sting is that the master isn’t society; it’s the next thing you think will finally be enough.