NON-AFRICAN POETRY 11. Examine God's reasoning in The Pulley. 12. How does the image of caged bird explain the boy's experiences in The Schgolboyt?

Answer Details

11. God's reasoning in "The Pulley". George Herbert's "The Pulley" is a metaphysical poem that explains, through an ingenious conceit, why God withholds the gift of rest from mankind. At the creation, God pours out his blessings upon man as from a glass or cup: strength, beauty, wisdom, honour and pleasure all flow into him. But God deliberately keeps back one blessing, rest. His reasoning is that if he were to bestow rest as well, man would find complete contentment in the created world and in God's gifts themselves, and would worship the gifts rather than the giver. "For if I should," God reasons, man would "adore my gifts instead of me, / and rest in Nature, not the God of Nature." By withholding rest, God ensures that man will remain restless and dissatisfied amid all his riches, and that this very restlessness, this "repining restlessness", will act like a pulley to draw him back to God. Weariness, if not goodness, will lift man's heart heavenward: "if goodness lead him not, yet weariness / may toss him to my breast." God's reasoning is thus at once loving and shrewd: he denies man earthly peace precisely in order to keep man's soul turned toward its true rest, which is in God alone. The poem beautifully reconciles human discontent with divine purpose.

12. How the image of the caged bird explains the boy's experiences in "The Schoolboy". In William Blake's "The Schoolboy", the image of the caged bird powerfully expresses the boy's suffering under a joyless, oppressive system of formal education. The poem opens with the boy delighting in a summer morning, the birds singing, the huntsman's horn, the sky-lark, all images of natural freedom and joy. Against this the boy must go to school, where instead of freedom he finds "a cruel eye outworn", tedious hours and harsh discipline that "drives all joy away". Blake likens the boy to a caged bird: "How can the bird that is born for joy / Sit in a cage and sing?" Just as a bird is created for open flight and song but is imprisoned and silenced in a cage, so the child is made for the freedom, curiosity and delight of nature but is shut up in the confinement of the schoolroom. The cage stands for the school that crushes the boy's natural spirit, dulling his eagerness and drooping his joy "like a bird that from its nest / robbed of its joy". The image drives home Blake's protest that rigid, loveless schooling stifles the child's spirit just as a cage kills the joy of a bird, robbing the young of their spring so that their summer may bear no fruit. Through the caged bird Blake pleads for an education in harmony with a child's natural love of freedom and life.