Tie The Strings To My Life My Lord - Analysis

A prayer that sounds like travel orders

The poem’s central claim is surprising in its confidence: the speaker wants to be bound to God so she can leave this life without hesitation. The opening request, Tie the strings to my life, makes devotion physical and practical, like fastening luggage before a trip. The tone is brisk, almost businesslike—Then I am ready to go!—as if the speaker has been waiting for this one preparatory act. What could be an anxious scene (approaching death, judgment, separation) is framed instead as coordination: a final check, a harness tightened, and the departure can happen.

Horses, speed, and the thrill of being carried

The first stanza’s image of horses and the clipped commands—Rapid! and That will do!—turn the afterlife into a high-speed ride. It’s not a dreamy ascent; it’s kinetic and a little dangerous. The speaker seems to take comfort in motion itself, as if speed can outrun doubt. Yet that urgency also hints at nervous energy: the repeated insistence that she’s ready sounds like a person talking herself into courage while the carriage (or whatever vehicle these horses pull) is already shifting beneath her.

The firmest side and the downhill Judgment

The second stanza introduces the poem’s clearest tension: the speaker wants firmness precisely because what’s ahead is unstable. Put me in on the firmest side is both a literal request (a safer seat) and a spiritual one (a steadier faith). She admits the ride is partly down hill on the way to the Judgment, a line that makes moral reckoning feel like gravity—inevitable, accelerating, hard to resist. The poem holds two feelings at once: eagerness to go, and an awareness that judgment is not neutral terrain. The speaker’s fear isn’t of travel; it’s of falling.

Bridges and sea: dangers dismissed, dependence confessed

In the third stanza the speaker lists hazards—bridges and the sea—only to dismiss them twice: never I mind, never I mind. The repetition is a bravado that partly convinces and partly exposes what it must cover. Bridges imply gaps and crossings; the sea implies depth, drowning, the unknown. If she truly didn’t mind, she wouldn’t need to say it. What steadies her is the line that follows: she will be Held fast in an everlasting race, not by her own grip but by a fastening that includes both parties: By my own choice and thee. That phrase is the poem’s spiritual knot: salvation (or safe passage) is neither pure surrender nor pure self-reliance. The speaker insists on agency—my choice—even as she asks to be tied, placed, held.

Good-by is not escape; it’s a deliberate renunciation

The final stanza performs the cost of readiness. Good-by arrives not as a sigh but as a severing: the life I used to live, the world I used to know. The slight stumble in used to lives (whether read as error or intensity) feels like a human tongue catching on the last attachment. And then, in a startlingly tender request, the speaker asks, kiss the hills for me. After all the hard images—strings, horses, downhill judgment—this is the poem’s softest moment. The hills stand for the earth as something beloved and kissable, not merely something to leave behind. The tone shifts here from command to intimacy, as if the speaker can finally admit she will miss what she is renouncing. Then she returns to her refrain—Now I am ready to go!—but it lands differently: readiness is achieved not by denying love of the world, but by naming it and letting it go anyway.

The risky comfort of being tied

There’s an unsettling implication inside the prayer. If the speaker must be Held fast, what does that say about her unassisted will—especially on a down hill road to judgment? The poem suggests that freedom, at this threshold, is not the opposite of binding but a kind of binding chosen in advance. It asks the reader to consider whether the most frightening possibility is death itself, or the moment of slipping—of falling out of one’s chosen faith when speed and gravity take over.