The Full Text of “The Pulley”
1When God at first made man,
2Having a glass of blessings standing by,
3"Let us," said he, "pour on him all we can:
4Let the world’s riches, which dispersèd lie,
5Contract into a span."
6So strength first made a way;
7Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure.
8When almost all was out, God made a stay,
9Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure,
10Rest in the bottom lay.
11"For if I should," said he,
12"Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
13He would adore my gifts instead of me,
14And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature;
15So both should losers be.
16"Yet let him keep the rest,
17But keep them with repining restlessness;
18Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
19If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
20May toss him to my breast."
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“The Pulley” Introduction
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"The Pulley" is English Metaphysical poet George Herbert's reflection on humanity's restlessness and God's loving wisdom. In this tender, witty poem, a speaker imagines God creating humankind and giving people every possible blessing but one: "rest." The longing for a kind of peace one can't find on earth, the poem suggests, is just another part of God's plan to draw humanity back into a divine embrace. This poem first appeared in the posthumous collection The Temple (1633).
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“The Pulley” Summary
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When God created humanity, he happened to have a cup of blessings to hand, and said to himself: "Why don't I give humanity every gift I can think of? I'll gather up all the world's far-flung wealth and shrink it down into one little human lifetime."
First, he gave humanity strength, which made a path for the rest of the virtues. Then he poured out beauty; then, wisdom, noble morality, and delight. But when he'd almost finished emptying the blessings-cup, God held back, seeing that only peace was left in the bottom.
He said, "If I also gave this last precious gift to my creation, people would love the things I gave them and forget all about me; they'd be so peacefully contented with their lives on earth that they wouldn't think to love the God who created all this goodness. Both humanity and I would lose out on something if that happened!
"So let's do things this way: humanity can keep all the other gifts I've given them, but they'll also feel a constant, regretful, distracting longing. Humanity shall be greatly blessed, but also tired out by life's travails, and by a nagging desire to come home to me. That way, if pure moral goodness doesn't draw them back to me, then exhaustion will!"
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“The Pulley” Themes
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Humanity's Restlessness and God's Goodness
Being a person, “The Pulley” suggests, means being “rich” in blessings but also full of “repining restlessness”—that is, a sorrowful, fidgety, distracted longing for a kind of peace and satisfaction that one simply can’t find on earth. The poem suggests that God gave people all sorts of precious gifts when creating human beings, but held back the final blessing of “rest.” That lack of “rest” means that earthly life is marked by an unquenchable dissatisfaction and longing. But this, the speaker argues, is all part of God’s benevolent plan: the “weariness” of such longings will eventually draw people back to “rest” in God’s embrace.
God bestows all kinds of wonderful gifts on “man,” the speaker observes, from “strength” to “beauty” to “pleasure.” Pouring out a bountiful “glass of blessings” on the work-in-progress that is humankind, God seems abundantly generous. But God also reserves one final blessing: “rest,” or peace.
If God were to give humanity this final crown “jewel,” the poem reflects, people would be too happy on earth, “and rest in Nature, not the God of Nature.” In other words, if people were too contented during their lifetimes, they wouldn’t long to be reunited with God, whose embrace offers a deep peace and fulfillment that’s beyond anything on earth. And if that were so, they’d “lose[]” out on a blissful reunion with their loving creator. Without this rest, on the other hand, they’ll delight in life, but still pine for the peace that only God can give.
A longing for a peace beyond what the earth can offer thus becomes a “pulley” that gradually winches humanity back toward God. This conceit presents restless longings (and perhaps even a longing for permanent relief from suffering), not as a flaw in an otherwise lovely existence, but as part of a wise and loving divine plan. By holding back “rest,” this poem suggests, God slowly draws humanity toward the peace of heaven.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Pulley”
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Lines 1-5
When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
"Let us," said he, "pour on him all we can:
Let the world’s riches, which dispersèd lie,
Contract into a span."The first stanza of "The Pulley" depicts God as a generous, inspired tinkerer improvising the creation of humankind.
"When God at first made man," the speaker tells readers, God just so happened to have "a glass of blessings standing by" to pour out on this creation. It sounds rather as if God made a cup of tea, forgot about it, and then rediscovered it—what a stroke of luck!
This gently funny moment establishes the poem's attitude toward God: this is a God whose "blessings" are so abundant that the greatest of them can be poured out without a second thought. Glasses of blessings might be cooling on bookshelves and countertops all over God's studio.
The poem even lets readers listen in on God's thought process in the moment of creation. Listen to the anaphora here:
"Let us," said he, "pour on him all we can:
Let the world’s riches, which dispersèd lie,
Contract into a span."That echoing "Let" might feel familiar to readers who are familiar with the biblical creation story in Genesis, in which God declares "Let there be light" to bring light into the world. This subtle allusion marries biblical grandeur to the touching image of God as a hobbyist talking to himself over his workbench.
But the project God proposes is a spectacular one. In planning to collect all the world's "dispersèd" (or far-flung) "riches" and shrink them down into a "span," God is preparing to condense every possible blessing into the short "span" of one human life, a miracle of generosity. This poem's God clearly delights in humanity.
Here at the outset of the poem, take a moment to look at the way the stanzas use meter:
- Each five-line stanza (or quintain) starts with a short line of iambic trimeter—that is, a line of three iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm:
- "When God | at first | made man."
- Then, it expands to three lines of iambic pentameter (five iambs in a row); then, it closes on another line of trimeter.
- In other words, there's a short-long-short pattern happening here.
Now compare that to what happens in the rhyme scheme:
- Each stanza is rhymed ABABA—for instance, in the first stanza, man / by / can / lie / span.
- The stanza's rhymes thus always end back on an A rhyme, returning to where they began.
In both its meter and its rhymes, then, this poem makes a there-and-back-again journey. These patterns will turn out to reflect the poem's philosophy.
Perhaps it would not be too big a hint to observe that the poem's title is "The Pulley"—and so far, there are no simple machines in sight. The metaphor of a pulley will become the poem's central conceit: this poem will ask what it is that draws people back to their origins in God.
- Each five-line stanza (or quintain) starts with a short line of iambic trimeter—that is, a line of three iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm:
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Lines 6-7
So strength first made a way;
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure.
Unlock all 326 words of this analysis of Lines 6-7 of “The Pulley,” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.
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Lines 8-10
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottom lay. -
Lines 11-15
"For if I should," said he,
"Bestow this jewel 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. -
Lines 16-17
"Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness; -
Lines 18-20
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast."
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“The Pulley” Symbols
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The Glass
The "glass of blessings" that God pours over humanity symbolizes God's generosity, bounty, and love.
There's something amusingly off-hand about this poem's image of God giving his gifts to humanity: God just happens to have "a glass of blessings standing by," like a forgotten, half-drunk glass of water on his drafting table. But that comical casualness suggests that God's generosity is so abundant that he can give overflowing "beauty," "wisdom," and "strength" to his creation without thinking twice.
This moment of symbolism might also subtly allude to Psalm 23, in which, famously, the speaker's "cup runneth over" with God's joy—or, for that matter, to the ritual cup of wine shared between worshipers at a Christian religious service.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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“The Pulley” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Conceit
Like a lot of metaphysical poems, "The Pulley" is built around the type of elaborate extended metaphor known as a conceit: the speaker envisions the human longing for "rest," or peace, as a "pulley" that gradually draws people back to God's embrace.
George Herbert often used such conceits subtly, introducing them in his poem's titles rather than unpacking them point by point across the whole poem (as his friend John Donne liked to). That's just what happens here. The idea of a desire for rest as a pulley doesn't really show up in the poem until the final lines of the final stanza:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast."Here, the poem pictures the very last moments of humanity's quest for peace: the final tug on the "pulley" that flings people into God's arms again (possibly making this sound).
But since the image of the "pulley" appears in the poem's title, readers will have it in mind throughout. The last lines thus end up working a lot like the metaphorical pulley itself does, flinging readers to a satisfying resolution just as it flings weary souls back to God's "breast."
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
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Metaphor
Unlock all 228 words of this analysis of Metaphor in “The Pulley,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
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Parallelism
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Repetition
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Allusion
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Pun
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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“The Pulley” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Pulley
- Dispersèd
- Contract
- Span
- Made a stay
- Bestow
- Repining
- Breast
Pulley-
A simple machine made from a rope hung on a turning wheel, used to pull heavy loads.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Pulley”
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Form
Herbert invents his own form for this witty poem—a form that reflects the conceit of a pulley. Each of the poem's four stanzas is a five-line quintain. And consider how those quintains are structured:
- They each use predominantly iambic meter—that is, they're built out of iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm ("When God | at first | made man").
- And they each start with a short line of trimeter (three iambs), then expand to three longer lines of pentameter (five iambs), then end on another trimeter line.
- They also use an alternating rhyme scheme (ABABA), so each quintain ends on the same rhyme it began with.
Both in its meter and its rhyme, then, the poem has a there-and-back-again shape, returning to where it began—much like the relationship between humanity and God the speaker describes! Like these stanzas, the poem suggests, people must leave their origin in God only to be drawn back to God's side by the "pulley" of longing.
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Meter
This poem is written in iambs—metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 6, which is written in iambic trimeter (meaning it has three iambs in a row):
So strength | first made | a way;
Da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM: this rhythm pulses like a heartbeat.
But the poem doesn't stick to trimeter all the way through. Instead, each five-line quintain follows the same changing pattern:
- The first and last lines of each quintain are always in iambic trimeter.
- And the middle three lines are always in iambic pentameter (they have five iambs in a row), as in line 13: "He would | adore | my gifts | instead | of me."
Each stanza's meter thus takes a journey that resembles the human soul's, ending where it began.
Of course, as in a lot of poetry written in iambic meter, there are plenty of variations here to keep things interesting. For instance, take a look at the rhythm of line 10:
Rest in | the bot- | tom lay.
The first foot here isn't an iamb, but its opposite: a trochee, a foot with a DUM-da rhythm. That up-front stress emphasizes the first appearance of the important word "rest," the metaphorical "pulley" upon which this poem turns.
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Rhyme Scheme
Each of the poem's four stanzas uses the same alternating rhyme scheme:
ABABA
That means that every stanza ends where it began, mirroring both the meter (which moves from shorter to longer lines and back again) and the poem's philosophy: humanity leaves God's side, the poem suggests, only to be drawn back again by a longing for God's peaceful embrace.
Some of the rhymes here sound slant to a modern reader: "creature" / "Nature" and "least" / "breast", for instance. However, they might well have rhymed close to perfectly in Herbert's 17th-century accent.
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“The Pulley” Speaker
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There's no clear speaker in this poem. Rather, the poem omnisciently tells the tale of an event that no one was there to see: God's creation of humanity. Readers listen in on God's own words, observing the divine thought process that led to the creation of a world without "rest," in which people are always longing for a kind of peace they can never find.
God, in this poem, is both loving and wise, knowing that perfect contentment on earth would only rob people of the ultimate joy of heaven. A little suffering on the ground, God reflects, will only draw people back to the blissful peace of eternal life.
While there's no identified speaker here, readers might well interpret the storyteller as George Herbert himself. A passionately devoted clergyman, Herbert often wrote autobiographically of his struggles with faith. Here, he seems to share his own hard-earned understanding of why a loving God might have chosen to make life on earth at once so beautiful and so "restless."
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“The Pulley” Setting
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This poem is set at the very beginning of the beginning: it charts the creation of humankind, when God decided to give people every possible gift and blessing except for "rest." Readers might thus imagine the poem's setting as the whole world. The struggles and joys the speaker depicts here are universal experiences. And in this speaker's view, life's difficulties have a universal solution, too: in this poem, God is both the creator of people's longings and the final fulfiller of those longings, slowly, patiently drawing humanity back into a loving, divine embrace.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Pulley”
Literary Context
A passionate, poetic soul, George Herbert (1593-1633) lived a humble life as a country priest, serving a small English parish that bore the exuberant name of Fuggleston-cum-Bemerton. Herbert, born a nobleman and raised a scholar, often struggled with the limitations his calling imposed on his life; he could easily have made a splash in a royal court, but he felt inexorably drawn to the priesthood.
While he never found public poetic success during his short lifetime, Herbert is now remembered as one of the foremost of the "Metaphysical Poets." This group of 17th-century writers, which included poets like John Donne and Andrew Marvell, shared a combination of brilliant intellect, passionate feeling, and religious fervor. Herbert was not the only one of these poets to work as a clergyman, or to explore his relationship with God in poems that sometimes sound more like love songs than hymns.
The Temple (1633), in which "The Pulley" first appeared, was Herbert's only poetry collection, and it might never have seen the light of day. Dying at the age of only 39, Herbert left the book's manuscript to his friend Nicholas Farrar, telling him to publish it if he felt it would do some "dejected poor soul" some good. Farrar, suspecting it would, brought to press what would become one of the world's best-known and best-loved books of poetry. The Temple would become a major influence on later poets from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to T.S. Eliot to Wendy Cope.
Historical Context
George Herbert lived and wrote during an unsettled period of British history. During Herbert's childhood, Britain was enjoying a golden age. The powerful Elizabeth I was on the throne, and Britain was both a formidable military power and a literary treasure house, boasting writers like Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marlowe. But the great "Virgin Queen" died without children in 1603, and her successor, James VI and I of Scotland and England, was not quite such a unifying figure. Many of his people were either skeptical of him or downright hostile to his rule. (The infamous Guy Fawkes, who was executed for trying to blow up James's Parliament, is one vivid example.)
The anti-monarchist plots James grappled with would eventually feed into an unprecedented uprising. By the time that George Herbert died in 1633, James's son Charles I was on the throne—but he wouldn't stay there for long. In 1649, a rebellion led by Oliver Cromwell would depose Charles and publicly behead him, a world-shaking event that upended old certainties about monarchy, hierarchy, and even God's will.
Though Herbert didn't live to see Charles's fall, he was still one of a generation of writers grappling with dramatic change and loss, reaching out to God for strength. This poem's reflections on why, exactly, a loving God would have created a "restless" world might have given Herbert and his contemporaries some consolation.
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More “The Pulley” Resources
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External Resources
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Herbert's Legacy — Read an appreciation of Herbert by contemporary poet Wendy Cope.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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A Brief Biography — Visit the Poetry Foundation's website to learn more about Herbert's life and work.
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The Temple — Learn more about The Temple, the great posthumous collection in which this poem first appeared.
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The George Herbert Group — Learn more about Herbert's continuing influence at the website of a society dedicated to his life and work.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by George Herbert
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