The Title Image of Herbert's "The Pulley"

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