what is the purpose of the poem the pulley?
Hello Laketra . Im an English teacher in Sydney,Australia and I don't have much on this poem but i found this in amongst my teaching notes .
Does it help answer the question for you ?
The central idea posited by Herbert is that when God made man, he poured all his blessings on him, including strength, beauty, wisdom, honour and pleasure. In Pandora's box, one element remained. God kept "Rest in the bottome." - 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 . 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. 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,"