The first stanza of "The Pulley" depicts God as a generous, inspired tinkerer improvising the creation of humankind.
"When God at first made man," the speaker tells readers, God just so happened to have "a glass of blessings standing by" to pour out on this creation. It sounds rather as if God made a cup of tea, forgot about it, and then rediscovered it—what a stroke of luck!
This gently funny moment establishes the poem's attitude toward God: this is a God whose "blessings" are so abundant that the greatest of them can be poured out without a second thought. Glasses of blessings might be cooling on bookshelves and countertops all over God's studio.
The poem even lets readers listen in on God's thought process in the moment of creation. Listen to the anaphora here:
"Let us," said he, "pour on him all we can:
Let the world’s riches, which dispersèd lie,
Contract into a span."
That echoing "Let" might feel familiar to readers who are familiar with the biblical creation story in Genesis, in which God declares "Let there be light" to bring light into the world. This subtle allusion marries biblical grandeur to the touching image of God as a hobbyist talking to himself over his workbench.
But the project God proposes is a spectacular one. In planning to collect all the world's "dispersèd" (or far-flung) "riches" and shrink them down into a "span," God is preparing to condense every possible blessing into the short "span" of one human life, a miracle of generosity. This poem's God clearly delights in humanity.
Here at the outset of the poem, take a moment to look at the way the stanzas use meter:
- Each five-line stanza (or quintain) starts with a short line of iambic trimeter—that is, a line of three iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm:
- "When God | at first | made man."
- Then, it expands to three lines of iambic pentameter (five iambs in a row); then, it closes on another line of trimeter.
- In other words, there's a short-long-short pattern happening here.
Now compare that to what happens in the rhyme scheme:
- Each stanza is rhymed ABABA—for instance, in the first stanza, man / by / can / lie / span.
- The stanza's rhymes thus always end back on an A rhyme, returning to where they began.
In both its meter and its rhymes, then, this poem makes a there-and-back-again journey. These patterns will turn out to reflect the poem's philosophy.
Perhaps it would not be too big a hint to observe that the poem's title is "The Pulley"—and so far, there are no simple machines in sight. The metaphor of a pulley will become the poem's central conceit: this poem will ask what it is that draws people back to their origins in God.