The Title Image of Herbert's "The Pulley"

The Title Image of Herbert's "The Pulley" by Raymond B. Waddington Given its status as a hardy perennial of the anthologies, "The Pulley" has received surprisingly little sustained critical attention. What there is has centered, unequally, on two issues: the word play on rest;'1 and the question of the relation between title and poem. It is the latter with which I am concerned here. Nineteenth-century readers evidently found this problem sufficiently baffling that two important editors felt free to substitute titles of their own choosing.2 In more recent times, following Rosemary Freeman's pioneering demonstration of Herbert's indebtedness to the emblem books, it has been accepted that "The Pulley" is one of several emblem titles evoking an image not present in the poem and, therefore, standing as a metaphor of its meaning.3 Not that an understanding of the titling procedure eliminates the interpretative dilemma. Such emblematic titles, as John Hollander has remarked, "can be so deeply implicit, as in The Collar' and 'The Pulley." that they can no longer be said to be standing in for the missing pictured object; one is tempted to say that the emblem exists only outside the poem and is itself being adduced in a peculiarly puzzling and thereby helpful way, as a gloss."4 In one dogged attempt to use the title image as a gloss to this poem, D.S. Mead explained: To make use of the pulley in the poem, God must be thought of as threading the rope through the wheel. On one side he lets down man and from his "glass of blessings" he gives man strength, beauty, wisdom, honor, pleasure. . . . Man can climb up the rope to God by virtue of his goodness, but in case he does not, and spurning his earthly riches yearns in his 50Raymond B. Waddington weariness for peace, God need but release His rest on the other side of the pulley and its weight, greater than man's unburdened soul, will hoist or "toss" man to His level.5 Aside from postulating a more benevolently interventionist God than the poem appears to warrant, Mead possibly errs in the over-confident assumption that a pulley means to Herbert no more than it means to a modern reader. But, as the OED reminds us, the pulley was "Used as an instrument of torture, or part of one" (B.1.b), citing examples from Reginald Scot (1584) and Milton (1641) that situate the currency of this denotation over Herbert's lifetime. Particularly associated with the procedures of the Inquisition , the torture of the pulley, or "squassation" as it was alternatively known, consists of this: the victim has his hands tied behind his back. A rope is attached to his wrists and threaded through the pulley mounted in the ceiling. His interrogators suspend him about six feet in the air and attach heavy weights to his feet. At this point the questioning begins. In the preliminary stages, refusal to confess would be countered with whipping. If the victim repeatedly refuses to talk, however, the pulley again is brought into action. The interrogators pull on the rope (no rope of sands, this), raising him up to the pulley, then abruptly letting him fall and, just as abruptly, stopping the fall short of the floor: "'tis thus performed . . .on a sudden he is let down with a Jirk ... by which terrible Shake, his Arms and Legs are all disjointed."6 As Herbert was aware, man is "a brittle crazie glasse."7 The precise referent of the title does not, of course, alter the paraphrasable sense of the poem; but it should sharply intensify and complicate one's awareness of both its tone and the poetic action. Edward Bliss Reed's 1912 proclamation that "Herbert has reconciled these unhappy experiences with a divine plan to bring the soul to felicity" anticipates a chorus of contemporary critics who find in the poem "Augustinian optimism," "an emphasis on God's love and generosity," "a thoughtful Creator deliberating."8 1 would argue that this is just the wrong response. Rather than reconciliation, this speaker bitterly intimates his hostility to a God whose providence has to be felt as...