Trey Walter – Religious Analysis of “The Pulley (1633)”


            During class on Wednesday, December 6th, a professor from another university came the Christopher Newport to host a seminar highlighting George Herbert’s poem, “The Pulley (1633)” and discuss how certain stanzas of this piece could be directly linked to the Bible and it’s teachings in two key different areas: God’s creation of Earth and Jesus’s crucifixion. 

The first stanza reads:

When God at first made man,
Having a glasse of blessings standing by ;
Let us (said he) poure on him all we can :
Let the world’s riches, which disperse lie,
Contract into a span.

In discussion this stanza was directly compared to the book of Genesis 1:26, the book of creation.  In this like, from the book of creation, we can compare to how God grant’s man the dominion over everything on Earth, which God has created for man.

Genesis 1:26 reads:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
In this line, God confesses to have created man in God’s own image and figure.  God grant’s man his permission to use Earth and its resources for man’s own betterment.
The fourth stanza of the poem, and last stanza a have chosen to analyze, reads:
Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlesnesse :
Let him be rich and wearie, that at least,
If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse
May tosse him to my breast.

During discussion this stanza was brought into comparison with the crucifixion of Jesus, and how John lay his head on his breast after he had been crucified and claimed by the disciples there after. 




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