THE PULLEY
George Herbert's "The Pulley" means that man is always restless and striving for more, and that this is necessary to force mankind to seek God and be good. The first stanza talks about how God wanted to bless mankind as much as possible. The second is one of the keys of the poem, and it states that God blessed man with everything except rest.
The first part reads, "When God at first made man, / Having a glass of blessings standing by; / Let us (said he) pour on him all we can." God pours wisdom, pleasure, honor and other blessings on man in the second stanza. The last line of the second stanza, "Rest in the bottome lay," means that the only blessing God did not give to man was rest. In the third stanza, God becomes concerned that man "would adore my gifts in stead of me." As a result, in the fourth stanza, God decides to "keep them with repining restlessness." He concludes, "If goodness lead him not, yet weariness / May toss him to my breast." So, essentially, God wants to keep man restless and weary in order to force him to turn to God for peace, since man cannot find it anywhere else.
Brief Analysis
In the poem, the central idea posited by Herbert is that when God made man, he poured all his blessings on him, including strength, beauty, wisdom, honor and pleasure. However, as in Pandora's box, one element remained. We are told that God "made a stay," that is, He kept "Rest in the bottome." We might, in modern parlance, call this God's ace. God is aware that if He were to bestow this "jewel" (i.e. rest) on Man as well then Man would adore God's gifts instead of God Himself. God has withheld the gift of rest from man knowing fully well that His other treasures would one day result in a spiritual restlessness and fatigue in man who, having tired of His material gifts, would necessarily turn to God in his exhaustion. God, being omniscient and prescient, knows that there is the possibility that even the wicked might not turn to Him, but He knows that eventually mortal man is prone to lethargy; his lassitude, then, would be the leverage He needed to toss man to His breast. In the context of the mechanical operation of a pulley, the kind of leverage and force applied makes the difference for the weight being lifted. Applied to man in this poem, we can say that the withholding of Rest by God is the leverage that will hoist or draw mankind towards God when other means would make that task difficult. However, in the first line of the last stanza, Herbert puns on the word "rest" suggesting that perhaps God will, after all, let man "keep the rest," but such a reading would seem to diminish the force behind the poem's conceit. The importance of rest -and, by association, sleep- is an idea that was certainly uppermost in the minds of Renaissance writers. Many of Shakespeare's plays include references to sleep or the lack of it as a punishment for sins committed. In Macbeth, for example, the central protagonist is said to "lack the season of all natures, sleep" and both Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are tormented by the lack of sleep. Even Othello is most disconcerted by the fact that he is unable to sleep peacefully once Iago has poisoned him with the possibility of his wife's infidelity with Cassio. Herbert's Pulley, then, does not present a new concept. In fact, the ideas in the poem are quite commonplace for seventeenth-century religious verse. What is distinctly metaphysical about the poem is that a religious notion is conveyed through a secular, scientific image that requires the reader's acquaintance with, and understanding of, some basic laws of physics.
Pulleys and hoists are mechanical devices aimed at assisting us with moving heavy loads through a system of ropes and wheels (pulleys) to gain advantage. We should not be surprised at the use of a pulley as a central concept since the domain of physics and imagery from that discipline would have felt quite comfortable to most of the metaphysical poets.
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