The poem "The Pulley," by George Herbert, is a very playful poem and that's somewhat
surprising, because the subject of this poem is really the creation and the
fall of mankind. But we see this playfulness right at the start because
the term or the title "The Pulley" is nowhere reflected in the poem itself.
There's no reference to pulleys anywhere, and so we'll come back at the end of
this video to talk about the title some more in some detail, because at this
point it doesn't make any sense to explain the relevance until we've
seen what the rest of the poem actually has to say. Now in terms of the poem we
also have two very different perspectives. On the one hand, we have the
biblical perspective so ... Genesis 1, 2, and 3,
where we see the creation of mankind. But then we also have references to Greek
myth, and in particular critics have felt that what we see here
is the story of Pandora's box. The story of Pandora's
Box is the story of how Zeus (that's the chief of the gods) gave Pandora this
wedding gift, this box, and it was kind of a malicious gift, because when she opened
it out of curiosity she she couldn't resist opening it. All of the evils of
the world flew out (death and illness and so on) but fortunately there was one
thing left in the bottom of the box and that was hope. We still have hope,
and in this poem we have rest. So rest kind of takes the place of hope,
and we'll see what George Herbert actually does with rest. What's striking
about Herbert's poem is that on the one hand we have something that seems
almost blasphemous, because he's really taking the two narratives of
creation and fall -- the creation of the universe and the fall of mankind --
and he's smashing them together. He's just blending them together into one story.
And obviously that's not a very biblical thing to do, but on the other hand the
idea of rest can be found in many of the writings of the church fathers and
there's a very famous line from Augustine. Augustine famously said about
God, "You made us for yourself and our hearts find no rest until they
rest in you." In other words, everyone desires to return to to God and to find
rest with God. So that part is, if not scriptural, it's at least a Christian
notion. It's something that we'll see develop through this poem. Hopefully
that gives you a little bit of context, and with that we can now start to dig
into the poem and see how it develops. So there are four stanzas and each stanza
is almost like a kind of quatrain (four lines) with an extra line added.
There's a little bit more, and as the critic Helen Vendler has pointed out,
this may be symbolic. This may be significant that we have this rhyme
scheme where we have ABAB and that's really a fullness.
And then we get the rest. We get this little bit of extra, so maybe that
extra bit, this fifth line, is significant in terms of the way in which we have all
these blessings and then we get something extra, some kind of rest. So
keep that in mind perhaps, although you could argue that sometimes critics make
a bit too much of the way in which form and content mirror each other. In the
opening stanza, then, we see that God creates man. "When God had first made man /
Having a glass of blessings standing by; Let us (said) he pour on him all we can ..."
And you get this sense that God is just doing this as he goes along. He thinks
maybe this is a good idea: we should just pour out some blessings here, and we have
a very anthropomorphic perspective of God.
What we mean by that is that we
represent God as if he is actually human, as if he has our characteristics/ So what
God says, then, is that he's going to take all of the riches which can be found in
different parts of the world, which "dispersed lie," and he's going to
contract them into a span. A span is the breadth of your hand, so not very
wide. Or it can also be seen as a length of time, a stretch, a width of something.
And here I think the sense is really the the life of a person. So within the life
of a person, within that breadth of a person's life, we have all these gifts
contracted, squeezed together. That's the blessing. Now, we find
out in the next answer what these blessings actually are. So as we move on,
the first one is strength. "Strength first made a way" (as it comes out of this vial).
There's this glass. "Then beauty flow'd, then wisdom, honour, and pleasure." And the
thing to point out here I think is that even though this is a religious poem
it's not a traditional Puritan poem, you might say. We have quite a bit of focus
here on what we might call humanist virtues: so beauty, wisdom, or pleasure.
These are seen as good things here. We don't have to live necessarily a very
restrictive life or see these as temptations, [that] we're tempted by
beauty or pleasure. But we can see that these things are enjoyable and that we
can praise God for them. Alright, so "When almost all was out" -- the glass is
almost empty -- "God made a stay." And "stay" here means that he stops.
So he made a stop we might say. "Perceiving that alone of all his
treasure / Rest in the bottom lay." The only gift
that's left is rest, and God is now going to consider whether he really should
give rest to people. It's worth pointing out at this stage that rest is a very
biblical concept. We see it of course on the seventh day of creation, when God
rests from his own labour. We see it in the Sabbath, the
commemoration of that event. In the Old Testament, the people of Israel looked
forward to the promised land when they would receive rest. Also in the New
Testament, if you think of what Jesus says in a passage like Matthew 11, verse
28, he says, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you
rest." So there is definitely the sense that rest is a biblical
concept, but what's different here is that God doesn't actually give rest! He
thinks maybe this is a bad idea. So in the third stanza, then, God seems to
change his mind. "For if I should (said he) / Bestow this jewel ..." (this jewel is rest, so
this points back to rest) "... also on my creature, / He would adore my gifts instead
of me, / and rest in Nature, not the God of nature: / So both should losers be." The
critic Chauncey Wood has pointed out that there's probably an allusion here
to the book of Romans in the New Testament. In Romans 1, verse 25, we read,
"They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped ... created things rather
than the Creator." So there too we have this split between nature and the God of
nature, and it's as if God is thinking: hmm, this is going to be a bad idea if I
give them rest because then they will have too much time to enjoy themselves
and to look at nature, and they'll forget about me, and that would not be a good
thing. Then both should losers be! Not
just God but also mankind, because mankind would no longer glory
in God. That's stanza three and with that we come to the final stanza,
and this is quite an intricate stanza because there are some paradoxes and and
plays on words that make this a very rich conclusion. "Yet let him keep the
rest," says God, and by this rest we mean these earlier gifts. So we had
these gifts: beauty, wisdom, honor, pleasure, and so on, and here God says, well, mankind
can keep those ones. But that's ironic, isn't it? Because he's not giving rest!
he's giving the rest, the rest of the gifts, and because he doesn't have
rest .. he doesn't really have rest! Do you see what I mean? It's sort of awkward to
explain this, but as the next line says, "But keep them with repining restlessness."
So these gifts will not be fully enjoyed because mankind will always be restless,
will always have desire for other things. "Let him be rich and weary, that at least, /
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness / May toss him to my breast." A number
of critics have pointed out that the word "rest" is actually found inside of
"breast." That brings us back to that Augustinian concept, that we only
find rest in God. The other tricky thing in this final stanza is the
concept of goodness, and critics are somewhat divided about how to read this.
Somebody like Helen Vendler, for instance, whom I've mentioned before,
feels that this refers to human goodness, so good works, as if God is saying, well,
if good works don't get people to heaven then weariness will, because people will
be so tired that they need to rely on a Saviour. Other people have suggested that
maybe goodness refers instead to God's goodness. Maybe this is God's goodness,
and not mankind's, and the reason they suggest this is because if you believe
in works ... if we focus on good works,
then we're making George Herbert not so much a Protestant (the Protestants often
emphasized faith rather than good works) and that doesn't seem in keeping with
the rest of his writing. Now, I don't think that this is necessarily a choice
that you have to make, that it's either good works or God's goodness. It's not
entirely clear here, and even if you pick good works it's only a hypothetical
situation. It says, "IF goodness lead him not." So even
if this is good works, God might be saying, well, it's unlikely that good
works are going to do it because mankind is incapable of fully saving himself. So
even in that sense weariness is going to be needed. Hopefully this makes some
sense, but you can see how much argument there can be about even one word here.
Now that we have a good sense of the poem as a whole, we can come back to the
title, "The pulley." Why is this called "The pulley"? I think you can see that the
poem is all about how God in a sense through His grace pulls us up to himself!
God is the one who finds a means, a method, some kind of mechanical advantage
you might say, by which he can make sure that we return to him, that our weariness
becomes a way in which we are tossed back to his breast. So that part I think
is is fairly clear. Some people contrast grace with sin, so
sin might be like the weight that keeps us down and prevents us
from rising. The poem doesn't say a tremendous amount about sin, but I think
we can probably relate weariness to sin in some ways. Another way in which we can
connect this is through Latin actually, and in Latin we have the word "restis,"
which is the word for rope. So "restis" stands for rope, and George
Herbert was a great Latin poet so I think he
probably would have been aware of this connection. Finally, we might even
think that George Herbert has a particular kind of pulley in mind, but I
want to caution you with this because I'm not entirely sure that this is
necessarily the case. To give one example here, the critic
Roberta Albrecht in 2008 published an interesting article in which she talks
about different kinds of pulleys, and she mentions this one pulley which is quite
interesting, where you can pull yourself up. If you sit on the bottom wooden
piece, put your legs over that, then you can grab a hold of the rope and pull
yourself up and the pulley will go up and up and up. And so you can kind of get
yourself to the top. The problem I have with this particular model is that
you're doing it all yourself. Now you could say that God gives you
these wheels, if the wheels are the specific blessings, the parts of the
pulley -- so beauty and ...
restlessness [and so on]. If God gives these these things and allows us then
through them to pull ourselves up, I suppose that would make a kind of sense,
but given what we said about goodness before I think we have to be very
careful not to think of the pulley as some kind of easy mechanical way by
which we can save ourselves. I think that Herbert would be resistant to that idea,
so I would very much suggest that whatever you think of the pulley, it is
in many ways God who constructs the pulley and who ensures that it is
mechanically efficient. Hopefully you found this an interesting poem. I think
it's a fascinating one. It's, as I mentioned, very playful, very experimental,
and it's interesting how Herbert manages to pull all these things together into
some kind of coherent, and entertaining, and devotional (it's still a very devout
poem) ... a devotional whole!