NON-AFRICAN POETRY Comment on the use of pun in Herberts the Pulley?

George Herbert's The Pulley is a metaphysical poem in which God, at creation, pours His blessings on man but deliberately holds one back. The whole meaning of the poem turns on a pun.

The central pun on "rest"

• The key word is rest, and Herbert plays on its double meaning.
• In one sense rest means repose, peace and contentment, the settled ease that would make man perfectly satisfied.
• In the other sense rest means the remainder, that which is left over. God pours out strength, beauty, wisdom, honour and pleasure, and when almost all is gone, the poet says the rest lay in the bottom of the glass.
• The pun binds the two ideas together: the one gift God withholds (repose) is also literally the last thing remaining (the remainder). Withholding "rest" in one sense is withholding "the rest" in the other.

How the pun carries the theme

• God reasons that if man also had rest (contentment), he would adore the gifts instead of the Giver and would rest in Nature, not in the God of Nature.
• So God keeps back rest with repining restlessness. Man's very weariness and dissatisfaction become the pulley that draws him upward to God.
• The pun thus embodies the poem's argument: the absence of one "rest" ensures that man's final "rest" will be found only in God.

Related wordplay

• The title itself works like a small pun-image: a pulley lifts a weight by pulling down on the other side, just as man's restlessness pulls him up to heaven.

Conclusion

The pun on rest is the hinge of the poem. By exploiting the two meanings of a single word, Herbert compresses his whole theology into a witty, memorable paradox, showing man's discontent to be a divine device for salvation.