Man hath still either toys or care: But hath no root, nor to one place is tied, but ever restless and irregular, about this earth doth run and ride. He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where He says it is so far, that he has quite forgot how to go there.

These lines come from Henry Vaughan’s religious lyric “Man,” written in the mid-17th century amid the devotional, introspective strain of Anglican poetry often grouped with the “metaphysical” tradition. Vaughan, shaped by the upheavals of the English Civil Wars and a turn toward spiritual writing, frequently contrasts earthly distraction with the soul’s true destination. In this poem he depicts human life as a restless wandering: people are absorbed by “toys” (trifles) or “care” (anxieties), lacking rootedness and forgetting the way to their real “home,” i.e., God and eternity. The passage belongs to Vaughan’s broader project of urging recollection, repentance, and spiritual orientation.

Vaughan contrasts human restlessness with spiritual rootedness. “Toys or care” suggests the two dominant distractions of worldly life: trivial amusements and anxious preoccupations. Lacking a “root,” man is pictured as unmoored—constantly “run[ning] and rid[ing]” across the earth, active yet directionless. The “home” he dimly remembers is not a physical dwelling but the soul’s true destination (heaven, or union with God). The poignancy lies in the paradox: he knows he belongs elsewhere, yet the distance feels so great that he has “forgot how to go there,” implying spiritual amnesia and the need for recollection, grace, and reorientation.