Chapter 6: Ways of Escape: Blake's "Mental Traveller"
William Blake's "The Mental
Traveller" serves as a good
introduction
to the coincidence of opposites in Blake because it
shows
the absolute failure of opposites to interpenetrate. The
opposing
male and female in the poem frustrate, dominate, and
torture
each other at every opportunity. Moving
contrapuntally
with
the negations between fixed male and female principles, in a
more
mobile opposition, youth and old age mutually torture and
attempt
to destroy each other. The images of
circles and of
opposing
centrifugal and centripetal forces that were crucial to
Cusa,
Pope, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley, here take
over
completely. Circles generated by the
insistent opposition
between
male and female threaten to end existence by their
claustrophobic
escalations of tension. Before Blake
finds
solutions
to the problems of opposites in his later poems, he
first
paints them, in all their detail and agony, in "The Mental
Traveller."
The oppositions in "The Mental
Traveller" create a poem that
well
serves as a cautionary tale in one's methods of
interpretation. At one extreme, some interpretations
emphasize
the
horror of the cycle of male-female domination; at the other
extreme,
some interpretations emphasize the eternal aspects of
the
cycle of spirit and nature. I prefer the
point of view of
Michael
Cooke, who emphasizes the poem's curious doubleness:
An atmosphere of outrage at the entire
scene pervades the
poem,
but there is also an uncontrollable fascination that
the speaker freely imparts.1
All
major forms of interpretation emphasize or imply the
inevitability
of the cycle, while only a few critics suggest any
hope of
escape. I maintain that the poem opens
possibilities of
escape
in almost every moment. An even more
optimistic view of
the
poem comes from Rachel Billigheimer:
Blake employs imagination in order to
escape the wheel of
time. . . . In the historical-mythic account
of "The Mental
Traveller" Blake symbolically
describes how freedom is born
from suffering that is turned into triumph.2
I think
that Billigheimer goes too far in reading this poem as
2
exhibiting
the triumph of the imagination. But I do
agree that
the
excruciating cycles of this poem point toward the freedom of
the
imagination that blossoms in later poems.
Quite clearly the characters in the poem,
or perhaps more
exactly
the principles of action in the poem, see opposites only
as
mutually exclusive. All attempts at interpenetration of male
and
female result in exclusion, torture, or destruction. Not
accepting
any co-existence of opposites, not accepting any
mutually
productive dynamic, not accepting any acts of inclusion,
the
male and female can try only to exclude or destroy or
overpower
or dominate. Imagination at any point
might find
freedom
from the cyclical trap; instead the trap grows deeper and
more
horrible. When the poem ends--"And
all is done as I have
told"--the
anticipated cycle promises to be even more brutal than
the one
in which we have just been spun.
Throughout the cycle, however,
opportunities for escape
abound. Most commentators recognize the promise of
liberation in
the
birth at the beginning of the poem. It
seems that the
torture
of the babe by the old woman might be avoidable. Even
though
reading the beginning of the poem in light of the end with
its
promise of repetition tends to dampen such a hope, the entire
poem
presents itself in a series of glimpsed, missed
opportunities. At every moment the perspective of the
imagination
is possible, as it is in Blake's
There is a Moment in each Day that Satan
cannot find
Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the
Industrious find
This Moment & it multiply. & when
it once is found
It renovates every Moment of the Day if
rightly placed.
(35:42-45, E136)
Putting
this possibility in the context of Blake's entire oeuvre,
without
specific reference to "The Mental Traveller," Thomas
Altizer
suggests a most radical hope based on acceptance of
despair:
The movement from Fall to Apocalypse is a
dialectical
movement through an '
participation in every turn of the
wheel. . . . Apart from
the joy and horror of our fallen history,
there could be
neither a real nor a dialectical movement
culminating in the
Apocalypse.
Therefore, every moment not only opens into
a fallen time and space. 3
Whether
or not we accept such an extreme insight, clearly Blake
calls
us in this poem to some such breaking of the normal limits
of
perception. Altizer's emphasis on the
inseparability of
fallen
vision and Edenic vision, with its acceptance of the
horrors
of the cycle, can help us to reassess our disapproval of
torture
in the poem. Nevertheless, we must guard
against a
complacency
that can be caused by Altizer's death-of-God
theology. Simple acceptance of the horrors is not
enough; it
must be
combined with an equal and opposite desire for escape.
Blakean
vision simultaneously accepts and rejects the everyday
world
of fallen vision.
From the very beginning of Blake's
illuminated works, his
tractates,
he distinguishes between poetic and empirical modes of
vision. Probably the most useful general way to
interpret "The
Mental
Traveller" is to apply Blake's conclusion to the tractate
"There
is No Natural Religion":
If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic
character the
Philosophic & Experimental would be
seen at the ratio of all
things, & stand still unable to do
other than repeat the same
dull round over again. (E1)
3
Ordinary
vision, single vision, everyday common sense, called
"Philosophic
& Experimental" by Blake, can live only a numbing
cycle. That cycle is perfectly represented in
"The Mental
Traveller,"
in which the characters and many interpreters can see
no way
to escape. The poet/prophet Blake,
through his narrator
who has
travelled through these cycles, gives us the most
horrifying
picture of the philosophic/experimental limitations on
existence. Mere empiricism, coupled with rationalism,
contains
no
spark with which to light the psychological and spiritual
darkness
that envelopes the cycles of "The Mental Traveller."
Like Blake's character Urizen when at his
worst, the
characters
in "The Mental Traveller" fear any change brought on
by new
life:
Urizen can understand recurrence well enough,
but the
presence within time and space of life, of
a power which
grows and alters its form, inspires in him
a feeling of
insecurity.4
Caught
in unquestioned ideologies, caught in the traps of
accepting
the natural world as a standard, such limited vision
can
only accept the revenge that makes the world go round. But
each
action, each state or condition in the poem, presents a
typical
Blakean hope concealed within the apparent hopelessness.
Each
crux in the poem can be interpreted as a hopeful possible
way of
escape. True, each time they have the
opportunity, the
characters
choose not to see Eternity, because each time the male
or the
female attains a potential for escape, the other negates
it. However, this cycle of despair, of failed
hopes, contains
the
germ of regeneration. This poem does not
show such
regeneration,
as do Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem, but it does
show
the problem in stark opposites that never find coincidence.
It does
define opposites that need interpenetration, but that
always
seek it only perversely.
Blake's concept of States and Individuals
also gives us a
useful
general framework in which to place "The Mental
Traveller":
Distinguish therefore States from
Individuals in those
States.
States Change: but Individual Identities
never change nor
cease.
(Milton 32:22-23,
E132)
The Spiritual States of the Soul are all
Eternal
Distinguish between the man, & his
present State.
(Jerusalem 52,
E198)
So Men pass on: but States remain permanent
for ever.
(J 73:45, E229)
Although
the second and third passages may seem to contradict the
first
because the former emphasize the changing nature of states,
and the
latter emphasizes their permanence, both passages do
emphasize
the dynamic nature of human identity.
"Every harlot
was a
virgin once." The problem in
"The Mental Traveller" can be
defined
as an insistence by the characters that everyone stay in
the
same condition. The actions of the
characters try to fix the
other
or the self in a permanent condition.
Ironically, as the
cycle
proceeds, such fixity is impossible anyway; the obvious
lesson
is never learned.
As the poem proceeds, the characters
undergo dynamic changes
of
condition, but they always try to hold on to the state in
which
they find themselves, to forestall any further changes.
The
turning cycle drives them outward with centrifugal force,
forcing
change upon them; their selfishness of limited vision
counters
with centripetal force, desperately and uselessly
grasping
and clinging. At almost every turn they
grasp, bind,
and
otherwise try to fix the state of the other individual and
therefore
of themselves. This grasping ironically
produces an
effect
not wished for: instead of freezing the cycle, such
grasping
spins it faster.
The poem begins by re-casting the
traditional word of human
universality--"Men"--into
a word of sexual division--"Men &
4
Women." These bland, acceptable terms, beginning in
line one
with
hegemonical unity, bifurcating in line two into a cheery
"vive
la difference," suddenly turn threatening and hostile as
the
narrator intrudes "dreadful" and "cold" into our world of
traditional
male dominance and sexual flirtation:
I traveld thro' a Land of Men
A Land of Men & Women too
And heard & saw such dreadful things
As cold Earth wanderers never knew.
After a first line which sounds like a
routine travel memoir-
-"I
traveld thro' a Land of Men"--the second line repeats half of
the
first line and adds an important split: "A Land of Men &
Women
too." In ordinary usage the first
line about men would
include
women. By emphasizing the two sexes
Blake underlines a
drastic
difference, an irreconcilable opposition that prepares us
for the
horrors of sexual separation that the rest of the poem
catalogues. He may also be including a little joke like
the one
that
Hamlet tells at the end of his "What a piece of work is
man!"
speech:
man delights not me; no, nor woman neither,
though by your
smiling you seem to say so.5
The
traditional obliteration of woman in the universal term "man"
not
only denigrates women by excluding them, but it also
highlights
the licentious flirtation that Hamlet and Blake imply,
the
flirtation of the battle between the sexes that spirals into
sadism
in "The Mental Traveller."
Women are the playthings of
men in
Hamlet's joke, the easy answer to a difficult question: if
life is
getting you down, go get yourself a woman.
Women are the
playthings
of men in Blake's poem as well, but in this vicious
equal-opportunity
cycle, men are also the playthings of women.
Without
the difference in the sexes, the world could not go
round;
without the mutual exploitation, the cycles of "The Mental
Traveller"
could not continue in the same mutually destructive
fashion. Although Blake does underline the categories
of male
and
female in a peculiarly twentieth-century way, his point is
not
equality of the sexes, but rather the mutual torture that the
two
sexes inflict on each other if they continue the same old
dull
round instead of using the imagination to escape or to re-
imagine
existence.
Throughout the poem the narrator's voice is
flat, simply
narrative,
almost deadpan. The only word that the
narrator uses
to
express his own feelings occurs in the third line: "dreadful."
Izak
Bouwer and Paul McNally interpret this value judgment in a
positive
way:
"Men & Women" . . . refers to
eternal archetypes, and it
follows that the poet visited the regions
of Man's eternal
reality. . . . The "dreadful" things recounted by
the
traveler are the events of this land of
eternal reality,
which are awe-ful, or sublime.6
Although
this open-minded generosity, in the spirit of Cooke's
"fascination"
quoted above, may help us to read the poem, such an
assertion
seems to deny the horror and even the detachment of the
narrator. Indeed, most interpreters of the poem see the
word
"dreadful"
as separating the narrator from the events that he
describes. However, if, as Gerald Enscoe suggests, the
narrator
is someone
who has already undergone the kinds of experiences
that he
is about to describe (403), then the narrator might be
showing
sympathy, not distance. Perhaps, with a
vigorous
stretching
of the imagination, a reader can see the word
"dreadful"
as all three: positive, pejorative, and sympathetic.
The
poem thus would set up a complex of attitudes that is not
simply
either accepting or rejecting, but both.
5
The "cold Earth wanderers" of
line 4 are those of us who fail
to view
the world with prophetic vision and can not see the
horror
of what men and women do to each other, and therefore live
trapped
in these horrors, frozen in our psychological state.
"All
are bound to the insistent simplicity of a role. . . . roles
exhaust
the possibilities of relationship in 'The Mental
Traveller.'"7 The ignorance of which line 4 speaks may not
mean
that we
have not experienced these tortures but that we do not
really
understand them. Surely every human
being who has ever
tried
to love has lived some of the horrors of this poem and thus
"knows"
them; just as surely, few of us understand our actions
and
feelings, and thus we "know" not what we do. By describing
the
cruel vagaries of love so starkly Blake urges us, as does a
satirist,
to front the process and thereby find a new way to view
the
events, perhaps to escape from the horrible cycle by leaving
it as
does the female babe in the middle of the poem or by
transforming
the cycle as Blake does in later poems.
Just as the first stanza upsets ordinary
categories of men
and
women, so the second stanza upsets, and even reverses,
ordinary
categories of sex and birth:
For there the Babe is born in joy
That was begotten in dire woe
Just as we Reap in joy the fruit
Which we in bitter tears did sow.
Thus,
the first incident in the poem is a birth, which in Blake
is
usually a hopeful sign. According to
Martin Nurmi and many
other
critics, the dreadful cycle that we are about to enter
could
be broken here, but it is not; the opportunity is missed.8
The strange thing about this birth is that
it reverses the
curse
in which birth happens in pain. In the
Bible Eve is cursed
by God
for her transgression of eating the fruit of the forbidden
tree:
I
will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in
sorrow thou shalt bring forth
children. (Gen 3:16)
Blake's
simple reversal invites us to redefine our unthinking
acceptance
of the agony of labor, just as the entire poem invites
us to reconsider
our unthinking acceptance of the battle between
the
sexes.
In addition to reversing the feeling
usually assigned to
birth,
the poem also reverses the traditional feeling attached to
sex,
for the babe has been begotten in dire woe.
Instead of the
expected
pleasure in sex and pain in childbirth, the poem gives
us pain
in sex and pleasure in childbirth. The
curses of the Old
Testament
Urizenic God are thus reversed at the beginning of the
poem,
but almost every action throughout the poem tries to
reinstate
them. By reversing traditionally
assigned values and
feelings,
Blake invites us into a potentially transformed world.
Each
new beginning in the poem promises to reverse an old curse,
promises
to begin to escape, but then succumbs to the same old
dull
round.
In this description of the birth of the
babe, Blake alludes
to a
Bible passage in which the Psalmist commemorates the escape
from
Babylonian captivity:
6
When the Lord turned again the captivity of
Zion, we were
like them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with
laughter, and our tongue with singing: then
said they among
the heathen, the Lord hath done great
things for them. The
Lord hath done great things for us; whereof
we are glad.
Turn
again our captivity, O Lord, as the streams in the
south.
They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that
goeth forth . . . bearing precious seed,
shall doubtless come
again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves
with him. (Psalms
126:1-6)
[emphasis added]
This
allusion implies that a chance for escape from any dreadful
condition
is possible. Such hints recur throughout
the poem, but
each
such hope gets trampled.
Gerald Enscoe suggests that Blake means
that sex has been
perverted
by Puritanical inhibitions into a dire woe, and that
the joy
of birth is really the female's relief at ridding herself
of her
inner burden, which she can now repay for the grief it has
caused
her.9 She has been imposed on; now she can
impose in
turn. Such a reading perfectly catches the cycle of
revenge that
is set
in motion, but it does so at the cost of any genuine joy.
Any joy
would have to be redefined as sadism.
Martin Nurmi, on
the
other extreme, wants joy to overcome sorrow.
He tries to
allow
both extremes, but can not:
the emphasis [can be] either on dire woe or
on joy. I
believe joy to be proper: although the babe
is begotten in
sorrow, he is born in joy.10
I think
a combination of these two readings, with nether denying
the
other, best opens up the Blakean dilemma, unsolved in this
poem
but solved later in the coincidences of opposites in
Jerusalem. In "The Mental Traveller," sorrow
and joy, stasis and
movement,
female and male, see-saw back and forth in manic-
depressive,
sado-masochistic ricochet. Each extreme,
by trying
to deny
the other, by trying to find solidity, as Urizen usually
tries
to do in The Book of Urizen and the Four Zoas, actually
forces
the cycle to spin faster and more cruelly.
The joy and
the
sorrow are both genuine, but the attempt to destroy either
one
traps us more inextricably in the dreadful cycles.
As soon as the babe is born, the old woman
tries to pin him
like a
butterfly specimen:
And if the Babe is born a Boy
He's given to a Woman Old
Who nails him down upon a rock
Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.
When the boy babe is given to the old
woman, the first
explicit
torture of the poem begins. The act can
be seen as
social;
society as a whole allows the torture to happen by giving
the
child over to the torturer. The passive
verb implies a
hidden
ideology, an action that has no clearly defined actor to
be
blamed. Haven't we always done it this
way? And if we have,
how can
anyone imagine new possibilities?
The first woman in the poem takes the babe
and nails him down
upon a
rock, thereby trying to force him into rigid, fixed
patterns,
to solidify him in his state. The
imagery recalls
Christ,
punished by man, and Prometheus, punished by Zeus. This
evocation
of Prometheus provides interesting echoes into
Prometheus
Unbound and Frankenstein, which has as its subtitle
"The
Modern Prometheus," and Prometheus Unbound. They both set
up a cycle
of punishment and revenge which seems inescapable. In
Frankenstein
the cycle is not escaped, but in Prometheus Unbound,
the
power of forgiveness, also the power of liberation in Blake's
Jerusalem,
does break the cycle of revenge.
As in Blake's Orc cycle11 over and over
again, as soon as the
7
spirit
of revolution or new life springs up, the forces of
repression
hasten to pin it down and rigidify it.
She binds iron thorns around his head
She pierces both his hands & feet
She cuts his heart out at his side
To make it feel both cold & heat.
The
iron thorns and the binding of the hands and feet, both
reminiscent
of the torture of Jesus, represent mental limitations
and
limitations of physical activity. This kind
of imagery,
emblematic
of the disastrous mutual torture of Ulro, is prevalent
in
Blake's prophecies. One example, with
imagery similar to this
image
in "The Mental Traveller," emphasizes the feeling of
invasion:
. . .
they cut asunder his inner garments: searching with
Their cruel fingers for his heart, &
there they enter in pomp
(Jerusalem
66:27-28)
Sacrifices
abound in Blake's prophecies as examples of the depths
of
human behavior. Northrop Frye persuasively
links sacrifice to
the
dominance of reason:
Human sacrifice in all its forms . . . is
the most eloquently
symbolic act which the dreaming Selfhood is
capable of
performing.
It illustrates every aspect of the Fall, and
parodies every aspect of eternal life. . .
. The motive for
human sacrifice is . . . an effort to
express the ascendance
of nature and reason in society.12
In
Frye's explanation Nature and reason band together to torture
humanity.
Nature, the ideology of keeping what is, provides the
excuse
for falling into patterns of unimaginative repetition.
Reason,
the insistence on respectable order, provides the
justification
for trying to remove recalcitrant or rebellious
elements
from society. Together Nature and Reason
fight to keep
out new
vision, to restrict the possibilities of life, and to
disqualify
the coincidence of opposites that is necessary before
we can
see a way out of the cycle of torture.
As the torture between female and male
continues, a cycle of
youth
and old age sets in. Leaving behind any
pretense of
realistic
travel literature, the poem shows the female moving
backward
in time:
Her fingers number every Nerve
Just as a Miser counts his gold
She lives upon his shrieks & cries
And she grows young as he grows old.
In this
cannibalistic image, the female grasps, manipulates, and
hoards. By living upon the male's shrieks and cries,
she implies
that
she can live only at the expense of his pain.
Thus, as in
the
whole poem, a zero-sum game is played: one contestant can
gain
only by making the opponent lose. To
make herself more and
to make
the male less, the old woman uses the youthful energy of
his
protests to nourish herself. In this way
new life serves to
replenish
and nourish old age, but instead of living with the new
life in
a reciprocal relationship, the old life attempts to
control
the young life and feed off it vampirishly.
Such feeding
enables
old age to feel that it is not growing older.
Old age
can not
stand to grow older, because it wants to remain in a
fixed
state in order to fend off death. In a
perversion of the
Eucharist,
the old woman binds the youth and miraculously sucks
8
his
blood out. She will not allow him to be
an integral being to
experience
but cuts out his heart and expose it to try to make
him
feel the way she wants him to feel. She
forces him to wear
his
heart on his sleeve, to be sentimental.
She wants to destroy
him
instead of allowing him to grow.
She invades his body even further when she
counts every nerve
as a
miser counts his gold. This image of
scientific analysis
and
hoarding greed reinforces the feeling of control, of misuse.
The
miser gorges himself on money as the past feeds itself on the
present,
as the harvester can gorge himself, muttering "I deserve
it." This image will crystalize into riches as
food later in the
poem. The past tries to assure its
"futurity" by repressing the
present. This perversion can feel certain only if
others are
tied
down and destroyed, or best of all, ingested, assimilated,
and
negated.
A similar kind of language appears at the
beginning of The
Four
Zoas when Tharmas and Enion split apart.
Tharmas, who hates
and
dreads clear articulation, complains:
Why wilt thou Examine every little fibre
of my soul
Spreading them out before the Sun like
Stalks of flax to dry
The infant joy is beautiful but its
anatomy
Horrible Ghast & Deadly nought shalt
thou find in it
But Death Despair & Everlasting
brooding Melancholy.
(Four Zoas
4:28-33, E298)
The
analysis that Enion and the old/young woman perform on the
males
takes vivid physical form, but it arises from rationalistic
analysis,
the kind that wants to take everything apart and see
what
makes it tick. "Our meddling
intellect" does "murder to
dissect."
When Urizen abjures his error near the end
of The Four Zoas,
he
relinquishes his desire for a fixed futurity:
O that I had never drank the wine nor eat
the bread
Of dark mortality nor cast my view into
futurity nor turnd
My back darkning the present clouding with
a cloud
. . .
Seeking the Eternal which is always present
to the wise
Then Go O dark futurity I will cast thee
forth from these
Heavens of my brain nor will I look upon
futurity more
I cast futurity away & turn my back
upon that void
Which I have made for lo futurity is in
this moment
(E390)
Urizen's
repentence is one of the solutions to the problem set up
in
"The Mental Traveller." That
solution never is stated in this
poem,
but it is always potential.
As the cycle goes on, the female grows
younger and the male
grows
older until they reach the same age:
Till he becomes a bleeding youth
And she becomes a Virgin bright
Then he rends up his Manacles
And binds her down for his delight
The
opportunity for mutuality appears as they reach same age, but
the
moment of possible renewal passes as fast as it arrives, and
the
male reciprocates the tortures. As with
the births of the
babes
at the start and end of the poem, the moment of potential
freedom
becomes instead an opportunity for further exploitation.
Like
the cycle of revenge that ruins the newness of birth, the
perverted
reciprocity of revenge holds on to the previous
condition
and allows it to infect the present state.
At the
birth
of the babe, the female ruined the potential for escape by
9
binding
him; now at the conjunction of ages, the male ruins the
potential
for escape by binding her. Any attempt
to hold on to
the
past is an attempt to freeze time, to allow no further
dissolution
of an egotistical self that hates change.
And
holding
on to vengeance from the past turns the screw even
further.
In Enscoe's Freudian reading of the male
and female as son
and
mother, 13 the mother seems to grow younger as the boy grows
older
and she seems to become just another woman.
In Enscoe's
reading,
just as the woman finds joy in punishing that which gave
her
sorrow, the male breaks his chains and ties her down for his
delight. Each revenges previous pain. The cycle of revenge goes
on. The potential for breaking out of the cycle
is destroyed by
the
binding which gives the male only a kind of perverted
pleasure,
based, in Frye's terms, on jealousy:
The abstract reasoner cannot see a tree
without dragging its
shadow off to the cave of his own mind. . .
. The Selfhood
cannot love in the sense of establishing a
kinship with the
beloved: it can regard the latter only as a
possession,
something to contemplate in solitude.14
When the male invades the female's nerves
as she had invaded
his,
the torture becomes even worse. The
cycle does not just
repeat
itself; it spirals into more intense torture.
Whereas she
counted
and anatomized, he goes further by planting himself,
becoming
a part of her, invading her more deeply than she did
him:
He plants himself in all her Nerves
Just as a Husbandman his mould
And she becomes his dwelling place
And Garden fruitful seventy fold
Now instead of metaphors of divine and
human sacrifice, the
metaphor
becomes one of gardening. The female
becomes mold or
fertile
earth, to be planted in by the seed of the male.
Although
plant and garden imagery is often pejorative in Blake,
in some
cases it does herald a possibility of escape from
disaster:
in Beulah the Feminine
Emanations Create Space. the Masculine
Create Time, & plant
The Seeds of beauty in the Space
(Jerusalem 85:7-9)
Near
the end of Jerusalem, in the most important Blakean example
of the
redemptive value of gardening, Los realizes that he must
act not
only as a hammering, active blacksmith, but also as a
waiting,
passive farmer:
The land is markd for desolation &
unless we plant
The seeds of Cities & of Villages in
the Human bosom
Albion must be a rock of blood. (83:54-56)
Again, however, the cycles of "The
Mental Traveller" blast
the
potential for fulfillment. Although the
garden image
contains
hope, the male character instead exploits its vengeful
portion:
by domesticating the female, he makes her into the
ultimate
housewife--a wife who is also a house: "And she becomes
his
dwelling place." Some interpreters,
such as Nurmi and
Bouwer,
see this stanza as positive:
The Spiritual principle [male], now dominant,
is able to
control the natural world [female] with
increasing ease and
joy, where before . . . it could express
itself in nature
only through suffering.15
10
Yet
Enscoe pinpoints both the extremity of the male's invasion
and its
potential for reversal. He calls the
action,
procreation by domination. It is 'himself' he is planting,
and ironically the self he plants will
become the female Babe
who will drive him away into the desert
later in the poem.16
Thus Enscoe's
reading incorporates the favorable interpretation
by
Bouwer, but judges the male's planting as cruel, even while
pointing
out its unexpected, freeing result. At
this point, a
reader
sees the diminishment of the female, but can hardly
imagine
her imminent liberation.
Soon the female, who has been so degraded,
seems to disappear
from
the poem as the old man wanders around the house all alone:
An aged Shadow soon he fades
Wandring round an Earthly Cot
Full filled all with gems & gold
Which he by industry had got
In
their insistence on maintaining a positive view of the male,
who in
their reading consistently represents the human spirit as
against
the female world of nature, Bouwer and McNally interpret
this
stanza as a positive view of the male.
Thus, by trying to
maintain
a consistent, fixed view, they fall into laborious
distortions:
We suggest that "aged" merely
indicates that the Spritual
principle is nearing full manifestation and
greatest
potency.17
The male has achieved a very perverse
potency indeed: not
only
has the woman been reduced to garden and house, but she has
been
reduced to smaller, precious commodities--jewels. When a
woman
is referred to as a jewel, she is being equated with the
object
of greed, miserliness, and possession.
She is small,
beautiful,
helpless, in fact almost non-existent, except as an
embodiment
of the ultimate object of man's desire.
The gems become emblems simultaneously of
courtly love and
religious
suffering:
And these are the gems of the Human
Soul
The rubies & pearls of a lovesick
eye
The countless gold of the akeing heart
The martyrs groan & the lovers sigh.
In this
stanza Blake rings changes on his own short poem,
"Riches":
The countless gold of a merry heart
The rubies & pearls of a loving eye
The indolent never can bring to the mart
Nor the secret hoard up in his treasury.
(E461)
These
gems of love and joy in this other poem, like the joy in
the
epigraph to this chapter, can not be trapped and hoarded.
But the
twists of pain and jealousy can become the miser's
object. Blake delineates the psychology of this
dynamic in one
of the
most bitter passages in Jerusalem:
All Quarrels arise from Reasoning. the
secret Murder, and
The violent Man-slaughter. these are the
Spectres double Cave
The Sexual Death living on accusation of
Sin & Judgment
To freeze Love & Innocence into the
gold & silver of the
Merchant
11
Without Forgiveness of Sin Love is Itself
Eternal Death.
(64: 20-24)
The gems thus, like most of the images in
the poem, contain a
dual
potential: they can be pain or they can be joy.
If joy,
they
are free and creative. If pain, they are
trapped and
unimaginative,
but still bursting with potential. Like
every
other
potential in the poem, though, they are twisted into
exploitation. As the ultimate exploited object, they become
food:
They are his meat they are his drink
He feeds the Beggar & the Poor
And the wayfaring Traveller
For ever open is his door.
Consistently,
Bouwer and McNally interpret this image as
favorable:
Stanzas 10 and 11 . . . describe the state
of Eden. . . . the eternal
forms appear fully assembled as the 'Family
Divine.' This family is the
'Council of God.'18
Although
exaggerated, this interpretation does underline the
potential
of regeneration. Greediness has become
charity, at
least,
although Blake's comments on charity in other contexts
make
the value ambiguous at best. When the
woman was old and the
man was
young, she fed off him. Now the
positions are reversed
as the
cycle has turned almost 180 degrees.
Just as they torture
and
submit to each other in perversions of genuine love, so the
aged
man takes the profits that he has made by exploiting the
woman,
does not even leave them in their organic form, but
hardens
them, makes them metallic, and uses them to exploit
others
in the name of charity. "Pity would
be no more if we did
not
make somebody poor." And indeed the
old man has already done
his
part to make another poor by exploiting the woman earlier.
His
grief, like the devouring joy in stanza 1, makes others
happy:
His grief is their eternal joy
They make the roofs & walls to
ring
Till from the fire on the hearth
A little Female Babe does spring
And she is all of solid fire
And gems & gold that none his hand
Dares stretch to touch her Baby form
Or wrap her in his swaddling-band.
Now the female reappears. Having been reduced into complete
domesticity,
into becoming a very house, she now is reborn from
the
hearth, the ultimate reduction of the household. The female,
who had
seemingly been eliminated, thus reveals herself as a
principle
that can not be destroyed. She cannot be
repressed.
She
must return. The apparent reduction,
even destruction of the
famale
has not taken place at all. She has
merely changed her
conditions,
her states, and now comes back stronger than ever.
According to Morton Paley, the female babe
is the archetypal
evil
female, who
unites numerous evil females of Blake's
pantheon. . . . She
is the sum of what the male has created up
to this point and
so represents, not an imaginative
achievement at all, as some
have suggested but the entirely materialist
values of the
urizenic Host.19
12
According
to Adams, at the other extreme, she is a force for
creativity. He even goes so far as to assert that the man
she
loves
is the narrator with whom she leaves the poem.20
Once again, a reader who can see both these
extremes at the
same
time comes closer than the reader who can see only one
extreme. Of course Paley is correct that the female
babe is a
result
of the materialistic values of the host; after all, she
has
been beaten down and domesticated by him.
On the other hand,
Adams
is correct that she is a counter force to materialism, that
she is
a creative force. For Paley assumes that
no creativity
can
arise from its diametrical opposite, materialism. But the
point
of Blake's use of the patterns of coincidentia oppositorum
is that
creativity can and does arise from materialism.
Paley's
vision
would miss that miracle, and would probably not understand
the
potential for renewal at this mid-way point in the poem.
Such a
miss would allow the horrible cycle to continue while the
female
babe is about to escape from tyranny into freedom.
Enscoe's interpretation accommodates the
doubleness, but goes
to the
extreme of missing the negative aspects of exploitation:
This grief ["His grief is their
eternal joy"] is positive.
If the Host felt no grief, if he were happy
in his position
as domineering tyrant, no hope of change
would exist, no
movement would take place from one 'state'
to another, no
"wanderers" would ever become
"travellers."21
While
Enscoe is correct in pointing out that the grief produces
changes
in state that may lead to a more comprehensive vision,
and
while his insight that some of the "cold Earth wanderers" of
line 4
may become mental travellers with the broad vision of the
narrator,
he neglects to acknowledge the genuine pain of
materialism
and exploitation. The gems to which the
female had
been
reduced now reappear as the solid gems of the female babe,
active
instead of passive, strong instead of weak, free instead
of
imprisoned. Thus the limit of reduction
turns back against
its
oppressor, but by refusing to repress him in turn, escapes
from
the trap, in a way similar to the escape of Prometheus at
the
start of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound.
We are not told why she can not be touched
but the strong
implication
is that she is simply too fierce. She
resists the
ideology
of naturalness that allows the boy babe in stanza 2
easily
to be handed over to the old torturing woman.
I agree
with
Enscoe's reading that the female babe is a hopeful sign,22
the
most hopeful among many such moments in the poem, similar to
but
even stronger than the birth of the young male at the
beginning
of the poem, and his reappearance at the end of the
poem. The young female is a sign that there is hope
to break
from
the cycle. She is the only one who does
not get caught in
the
cycle. And indeed she will be the only
character who does
escape
from the cycle to find a new life. Every
new birth gives
such a
hope, whereas the mere cycle of young-old-young-old-young
promises
nothing but the same old mistakes over and over again.
Not
only can no one touch her, but no one can wrap her in a
swaddling
band. This image not only reminds us
that she cannot
be
restricted, but also reminds us of the birth of Christ, the
sacrifice
par excellence, who was invoked in stanzas 3 and 4.
She is
neither a passive sexual victim nor a sadistic sexual
aggressor,
as is every other character in the poem.
But She comes to the Man she loves
If young or old or rich or poor
They soon drive out the aged Host
A Beggar at anothers door.
She
uses the power of her will to make a conscious choice instead
of
imposing herself or being imposed upon, as do the other
13
characters. "The female babe has choices beyond the
perceptual
scope
of the poem."23 And she does not
use the state of the man,
"young
or old or rich or poor," to determine her choice. Instead
of
acting out of a reflex of revenge, she, as an individual,
chooses
another individual rather than simply reacting to him
because
of his state. She freely comes to the
man she loves
without
regard to his condition becasue she will not exploit him,
and she
will not be exploited by him. Bloom
reads her choice of
a lover
as a rejection of age in favor of youth.24
But such an
interpretation
flies in the face of the explict disclaimer, "if
young
or old or rich or poor." The
categories that determine the
other
actions in the poem do not determine hers, just as the
ideologies
of "nature" and reason do not determine the decisions
of
Blake.
She is not choosing youth, but a different
psychological
state,
just as her original condition after birth was a state not
amenable
to the tortures of the cycle. What she
chooses is so
different
from the values of the rest of the poem that she must
disappear
from the poem entirely. What is
important is that she
freely
chooses her lover and makes a new life for herself outside
the
cycle. Many critics, including Bloom,
see this as nature
turning
against man, but in fact the man carries on the cycle
without
her because she has left the cycle. She
did not turn
against
him. She refused the cycle of mutual
torture. We see
her no
more because she now lives beyond this poem, in a
different
state, a different dimension, which we will not see
directly
until the conclusions of Blake's epics.
This frozen man's own frozen state drives
him out. He is
driven
out because he deserves to be. Since
above I have used
one of
Blake's definitions of the prophetic character as a
general
guide to my interpretation of "The Mental Traveller," one
of his
other definitions of the prophet will be helpful at this
point. The prophet, according to Blake, is not one
who can
simply
predict the future. The prophet,
speaking his opinion
frankly,
is one who sees deeply into the meanings and results of
people's
actions:
Every honest man is a Prophet he utters his
opinion both of
private & public matters/Thus/If you go
on So/the result is
So/He never says such a thing shall happen
let you do what
you will.25
The
entire cycle of "The Mental Traveller" is caused by the ways
in
which the male and female go on. The old
man has not been
harmed
by the female babe. Quite the contrary,
he has created
the
very situation in which he must be driven out into the
freezing
cold. Clinging, reducing, trying
greedily to grasp his
present
state, he has created his own metaphysics, as does the
angel
in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, who sees the horrors of
spiders,
Leviathan, and tygers, and is told, "All that we saw was
owing
to your metaphysics" (E42).
Having exploited the woman-garden, hoarded
up his jewels like
a
miser, and then pityingly fed off them and fed them to others,
the old
man loses the love of the female babe, who will not be
bound. He has reached the limit of contraction; he
has pushed so
far
that he gets pushed back. The old man
who pitied and fed the
beggars
now becomes himself a beggar; he becomes what he beheld.
Whereas
earlier he wandered inside his own Cot, this time his
wandering
takes him far away. At least in his
cottage surrounded
by his
jewels, he could feel some material security.
Now
completely
lost, his security fades even further away.
Miserliness
and jealous holding do not guarantee that he can keep
his
possessions; despite (or perhaps because of) his greed, his
possessions
flee his grasp. He is now pitiful
himself and
dependent
on the mercy and charity of others:
He wanders weeping far away
14
Untill some other take him in
Oft blind & age-bent sore distrest
Untill he can a Maiden win
Wandering and lost, he thinks his distress
can be alleviated
only by
winning, conquering a maiden. He wants
her as an object
because
he can not live with an independent female.
Although the
woman
he finds is not a continuation of the female babe, who has
chosen
a path out of the cycle, she does seem to be a
continuation
of the earlier females who were bound down.
Although
he is wandering in time and space, he remains in the
same
psychological state of egotistical grasping.
When the
female
babe breaks out of the cycle, the male keeps the cycle
going
by finding a substitute. Refusing the
potential for escape
that he
has just been shown, he tries to recapture the domestic
woman
of line 27. He does not come to her or
allow her to come
to him,
but instead insists on winning her as a prize, thus
perpetuating
the cycle of exploitation. Instead of
two mutually
agreeing
to come together, one dominates the other, making the
other
into an object of torture and perverse pleasure:
And to allay his freezing Age
The Poor Man takes her in his arms
The Cottage fades before his sight
The Garden and its lovely Charms.
Once he
grasps the maiden, even the little vision that remained
fades
away. He has reached his limit of age,
his limit of
contraction,
and now even his false visions disappear.
He has
already
been forced (because he was first an exploiter and then a
pitying
philanthropist) to leave the cottage, garden, and inn and
wander
far away from them. When he tries to
regain what he has
lost,
even the re-won cottage and garden fade from his sight.
Even
the possibilities of the kind of perverted love that he
possessed
before have disappeared. His grasping
exploitation
destroys
life, and so now the whole universe becomes a desert
which
his perversions have created for him.
The cycle worsens:
instead
of a garden and jewels on which to feed, he has no food
at
all. The guests who had been able to
find some kind of
shelter
and food are now scattered, just as the old man himself
had
previously been driven away:
The Guests are scatterd thro' the land
For the Eye altering alters all
The Senses roll themselves in fear
And the flat Earth becomes a Ball.
The
last two lines of this stanza, although not simple, are
fairly
easily understood: Blake consistently prefers a vision of
a flat
Earth to that of a round one. The round
Earth is a result
of the
roundness of the eye, which is a limitation of the
potential
for infinite vision. The second line of
the stanza,
however,
suggests Blake's peculiar delineations of perspectives
of
vision. Those perspectives range from a
rather simple
concept--our
perceptions are limited to our immediate
surroundings--to
a complex conceit of vortices that strains even
the
best interpretive talents of Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom.
In a strange (but strangely commonsensical)
passage in
Milton,
Blake redefines a person's universe as the space in which
he
lives:
The Sky is an immortal Tent built by the
Sons of Los
And every Space that a Man views around his
dwelling-place:
Standing on his own roof, or in his garden
on a mount
Of twenty-five cubits in height, such space
is his Universe;
And on its verge the Sun rises & sets.
the Clouds bow
15
To meet the flat Earth & the Sea in
such an orderd Space:
The Starry heavens reach no further but
here bend and set
On all sides & the two Poles turn on
their valves of gold:
And if he move his dwelling-place, his
heavens also move.
(Milton
29:4-12), E126)
A reader
might think that Blake is mocking this limited kind of
existence,
in which the individual perceives only his own tiny
world. But as the passage goes one, Blake attacks
abstract
cosmography:
Where'er he goes & all his
neighbourhood bewail his loss:
Such are the Spaces called Earth & such
its dimension:
As to that false appearance which appears
to the reasoner,
As of a Globe rolling thro Voidness, it is
a delusion of Ulro
(Milton
29:13-16; E126)
The
reader of Milton is given much help in that poem to grasp
this
concept of space: instead of an abstract round globe that
can be
conceived only by reason, a globe that no one can
perceive,
Blake gives us a homey neighborhood of a universe,
individualized,
mobile, and alive. We do not receive
much help
with
this concept in "The Mental Traveller," and yet the
conception
seems essentially the same: each individual carries a
universe,
which can be changed if the individual's perceptions
change,
for better or for worse.
So far, so good. One of Blake's most notorious passages,
however,
ratchets this issue of perspectives up a few notches:
The nature of infinity is this: That every
thing has its
Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro'
Eternity
Has passd that Vortex, he percieves it roll
backward behind
His path, into a globe itself infolding;
like a sun:
Or like a moon, or like a universe of
starry majesty,
While he keeps onwards in his wondrous
journey on the earth
Or like a human form, a friend with whom he
livd benevolent.
As the eye of man views both the east &
west encompassing
Its vortex; and the north & south, with
all their starry host;
Also the rising sun & setting moon he
views surrounding
His corn-fields and the valleys of five
hundred acres square.
Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and
not as apparent
To the weak traveller confin'd beneath the
moony shade.
Thus is the heaven a vortex passd already,
and the earth
A vortex not yet pass'd by the traveller
thro' Eternity.
(Milton
15:21-35)
Nurmi
uses this passage as a way of explaining what happens in
"The
Mental Traveller":
The aged outcast passes through a
'vortex'--that curious optical-symbolic
phenomenon of Blake's in which a perceiver
goes as far with one kind of
perception as he can and passes through the
object, as it were, to the
other side to a different way of looking at
it.26
This
solid explanation clearly implies the reversal in vision
that
happens in the poem: flat planes become spheres as the
perceiver
seems to be seeing through the wrong end of a weird
telescope.
Harold Bloom's explanation captures the
doubleness of eternal
vision
as he puts center and circumference together:
The vortex is the eddy or whirlpool of
eternal consciousness,
16
whose center is the object eternal
consciousness intends.
Since center and circumference are not
separate in eternal
vision, the perceiver is at once the apex
of his vision, and
yet able to regard it from a distance. But when Milton
passes into Beulah, he leaves eternity for
time, and moves to
the apex of his own vision. He is thus objectified, and the
eternal circumference of his vision rolls
up behind him. The
eddy of perception is solidified into the
globed universe of
Newtonian observation. What survives of eternal vision
depends upon the temporal perceiver's
imagination, for he can
still
encompass his vortex and see the object world in its
human dimension (line 27), as "one
infinite plane" (32). 27
Bloom's
explanation may be more obscure than Blake's passage. As
so
often, the best explanation comes from Northrop Frye:
. . . when we see ourselves as imprisoned
in a huge concave
vault of sky we are seeing from the point
of view of a head
that is imprisoned in a concave vault of
bone. . . . Blake
says that everything in eternity has what
he calls a 'vortex'
(perhaps rather a vortex-ring), a spiral or
cone of
existence.
When we focus both eyes on one object, say a
book, we create an angle of vision opening
into our minds
with the apex pointing away from us. The book therefore has
a
vortex of existence opening into its mental reality within
our minds.
When Milton descends from eterntiy to time, he
finds that he has to pass through the apex
of his cone of
eternal vision, which is like trying to see
a book from the
book's point of view; the Lockian
conception of the real book
as outside the mind on which the vision of
the fallen world
is based.
This turns him inside out, and from his new
perspective the cone rolls back and away
from him in the form
of a globe.
That is why we are surrounded with a universe of
remote globes, and are unable to see that
the earth is 'one
infinite plane.' But in eternity the perceiving mind or body
is omnipresent, and hence these globes in
eternity are inside
that body.
Before the Fall, Man was abolute
wisdom, and was the
circumference of everything. Nothing then existed outside
Albion: sun, moon, stars, the center of the
earth and the
depth of the sea, were all within his mind
and body, a body
fully conscious of being alive, not only in
its brain, but in
all parts of iteself down to the feet. Hence 'opening a
centre,' as described above, is the
imagination's way of
reversing the fallen perspective of the
world, and uniting an
individual imagination with the universal
one.28
Of
course the process in "The Mental Traveller" is the reverse of
the
kind of opening that Frye describes.
Instead of achieving a
visionary
perspective, the male in the poem is making sure that
he
deepens his fallen perspective.
The reason that the narrator can see what
cold earth
wanderers
can not is that he has adjusted his vision so that he
sees
the opposites of center and circumference simultaneously.
He has
passed through the states of pain and jealousy that
pervade
that poem. But the characters within the
poem, with the
possible
exception of the female babe and her lover, do not see
clearly
and in fact do not take the opportunities offered them to
see
clearly. Instead they perpetuate the
cycle of repression,
torment,
and submission.
The loss of vision and sustenance continues
as vision
continues
to shrink:
The Stars Sun Moon all shrink away
A desart vast without a bound
And
nothing left to eat or drink
And a dark desart all around.
17
The
Ptolemaic universe, become the Copernican, is now the
Newtonian,
where all is mathematical and finite.
Instead of an
infinite
flat earth close to the heavenly bodies, the altered
vision
of the aged man creates a sterile, mathematical earth,
infertile
with nothing but desert. At least
earlier he had been
able to
plant a garden, even if it was built on the pain of
another. Instead of a vision that includes the
coincidence of
opposites,
this vision can see only separation.
Again, it is important to emphasize that
the poem itself does
not
give us direct reason for hopes of fuller vision, but in
juxtaposition
to those poems that do, we can obtain a fuller
understanding
of the limits in "The Mental Traveller."
Now at the limit of sterility, the male
figure begins to
return
to his childhood.
The honey of her Infant lips
The bread & wine of her sweet smile
The wild game of her roving Eye
Does him to Infancy beguile.
The
honey seems like the manna in the desert for the children of
Israel
in their wanderings. The bread and wine
seem like the
Eucharist. However, the imagery turns sour as the stanza
proceeds. The honey and bread and wine become a wild
game from a
roving
eye. Flirtation keeps the cycle
going. As a corollary to
the old
man who could imagine only a maiden whom he could win and
clutch,
now the female can imagine only a man whom she can lead
on,
instead of meeting directly. She does
not simply lead or
inspire
him but beguiles him, with more than a hint of guile.
For as he eats & drinks he grows
Younger & younger every day
And on the desart wild they both
Wander in terror & dismay.
Again a
moment of escape seems to flit past as the male grows
younger
to reach the age of the female. In
stanza 6 the terms
"bleeding
youth" and "virgin bright" clearly implied that they
were
about the same age. Here in stanza 19
the implication is
more
subtle, but as the strange ascent and descent in age
continues,
they must once again be at the same age.
Missing
their
opportunity, they struggle on, lost and separate.
The splitting of male and female is
predominant in Blake's
myth,
usually based on the Bible creation story, and usually
personified
in Los and Enitharmon:
She separated stood before him a lovely
Female weeping
Even Enitharmon separated outside, &
his Loins closed
And heal'd after the separation: his pains
he soon forgot:
Lured by her beauty outside of himself in
shadowy grief.
Two Wills they had; Two Intellects; &
not as in times of old.
Silent they wanderd hand in hand like two
Infants wandring
From Enion in the desarts, terrified at
each others beauty
Envying each other yet desiring, in all
devouring Love
(Jerusalem 86:57-64)
He
feeds off her, just as earlier the man had made the woman into
his
garden. But this time the female is the
active one, he the
willing
victim. In perversions of potential
sexual relationships
the
female feeds off the pain of the male, and the male feeds off
18
the
teasing of the female. The
intensification of the horrors of
the
cycle leaves the two main characters now wandering together
and yet
apart in the desert. No longer do we
have a rock with
nails,
nor do we have a cottage or a garden, all with some kind
of
permanence and security. For security
can not be forced, and
the
more one tries to force it, the less one has it.
Like the wild Stag she flees away
Her fear plants many a thicket wild
While he pursues her night & day
By various arts of Love beguild.
Now
instead of her active teasing, her passive fear is
emphasized. The result of that fear is a planting of
thickets,
obstacles
to the male's pursuit. And yet soon
those thickets
change
their connotation from obstruction to fertility in the
desert:
By various arts of Love & Hate
Till the wide desart planted oer
With Labyrinths of wayward Love
Where roams the Lion Wolf & Boar.
The
second line of that stanza again gives us a glimpse of a
possibility
of fertility, but soon that possibility is perverted
into
messy "Labyrinths." In a
technique similar to that in the
opening
two lines of the poem--"I travelled through a land of Men
/ A
Land of Men & Women too"--Blake repeats the last line of
stanza
20 in the first of 21: "By various arts of Love beguild /
By
various arts of Love and Hate." The
repetition with addition
reveals
a split concealed by the traditional term.
As generic
man
includes hidden woman in the first stanza, so generic love
includes
hidden hate. The most basic opposites in
human
existence,
as many cliches realize, live inextricably together.
When the male reaches his renewed youth and
the woman her
renewed
old age, we feel that we are very close to where we
started. In fact we are almost there, but before we
get to that
terrible
promise of repetition of the cycle, we see one more
glimmer
of hope, the most beautiful and extended image in the
poem:
Till he becomes a wayward Babe
And she a weeping Woman Old
Then many a Lover wanders here
The Sun & Stars are nearer rolld
The trees bring forth sweet Extacy
To all who in the desart roam
Till many a City there is Built
And many a pleasant shepherds home.
Many interpreters see this passage as
positive, as another
chance
for renewal:
The moment when man may return to Eden is
at hand, and
everything is fruitful and productive. A Second Coming has
arrived, if only mankind knew it.29
While the male is still a Babe, and the
woman is merely
weeping over the past but is not actively
continuing the
cycle, a brief glimpse of another possibility is presented.30
19
The world that had shrunk and fallen away
from the stars, the
world
that had become a desert without civilization or shepherds,
has now
become a city and a pasture once again. The
labyrinths
of
thickets caused by the torments of love and jealousy in
stanzas
20-21 have been transformed into sweet trees.
The beauty
of this
scene offers itself for man and woman if they will only
accept
it. The two people are not happy, to be sure,
for he is
wayward
and she is weeping, but there is hope of possible
repentance
here. After all, hasn't the altering eye
provided its
own
best environment? Many lovers wander
here how; even if lost,
they
may hope that the guests will return, that the mistakes of
the
past can be made up for.
Suddenly, after this respite, the horrors
of the cycle
reassert
themselves. There is no joy in the
discovery of the
babe
this time, as there was in stanza 2. In
fact the babe is
not
"born" as he was in the beginning of the poem, marking a new
beginning. Instead he has reached his present condition
by
regressing
from adulthood.
But when they find the frowning Babe
Terror strikes thro the region wide
They cry the Babe the Babe is Born
And flee away on Every side
For who dare touch the frowning form
His arm is witherd to its root
Lions Boars Wolves all howling flee
And every Tree does shed its fruit
And none can touch that frowning form
Except it be a Woman Old
She nails him down upon the Rock
And all is done as I have told.
In the
beginning the babe was easily given to the old woman, but
here he
can be touched by none but an old woman.
Anyone else who
tries
to touch (in order to bind) destroys himself.
Even the
wild
beasts that helped make the labyrinths of wayward love more
terrifying
are terrified by this new babe. The
trees that had
brought
forth ecstasy give up their fruit.
The last line of the poem--"And all is
done as I have told"--
seems
to indicate that the cycle will be repeated endlessly. In
fact,
since the babe seems even more terrifying than he did in
stanza
2, the ending implies that the cycle will progressively
worsen. And yet, despite its apparent bleakness, the
poem works
to
encourage in us the hope that the horrible cycle can be
broken. In fact, if the babe can not be so easily
rounded up,
perhaps
he, like the female babe in the middle of the poem, can
find a
new consciousness outside this closed universe.
Two critics in particular enunciate a
hopeful interpretation
of the
poem. Enscoe and Adams both place their
faith in the
voice
of the narrator. Enscoe cliams--and his
claim I believe
can be
allowed only on the strength of the first stanza--that the
narrator
clearly speaks from a larger perspective:
Blake has presented an alternative to this
world of the male-
female struggle for domination. . . . a
voice speaking from a
state that allows men to see beyond present
reality.31
Adams goes even further to link the
narrator with Blake's
creative
hero in the later poems and indeed to implicate Los in
the
poem itself: "The speaker of the poem is Los and he has been
loved
by the female babe."32
Thus
the narrator has actively participated in breaking the cycle
by
escaping with the female babe.
I think that both Enscoe and Adams read too
much into the
poem,
but I do agree with the spirit of their interpretations.
Although
the poem itself does not provide us with such a robust
hope,
we can legimately read it in the context of Blake's later
works,
where such robust hope unmistakably appears.
"The Mental
Traveller,"
then, is the scorching, despairing portrait of human
existence,
epitomized in male-female struggles, when caught in
the
ratio of limited vision. It is all the
more painful in that
the
characters constantly miss the glimpses of a larger, more
poetic
vision that would allow them to escape the cycle.
As the cycle spins, centrifugal force
drives the characters
out. Only the female babe takes the leap provided
by such
propulsion. All the other characters impose the
centripetal
force
of clinging egotism, trying to hold the sacred, secret
center. Instead of creating a dynamic
interpenetration of
opposites,
they create a deadly balance.
Notes
to Chapter 6: Blake's "Mental Traveller"
1. Acts of Inclusion (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979),
p. 150.
2. Wheels of Eternity (NY: St. Martin's, 1990),
pp. 3, 101.
3. The New Apocalypse, (Lansing: Michigan UP,
1967), pp. 215-16.
4. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton
UP, 1969), p. 221.
5. Hamlet II.ii.295.
6. Izak Bouwer, and Paul McNally, "'The
Mental Traveller': Man's
Eternal
Journey," Blake: An Illustrated Newsletter, Winter 1978-
79, p.
186.
7. Cooke, Acts, p. 153.
8. Martin Nurmi, "Joy, Love, and Innocence
in Blake's 'The
Mental
Traveller,'" Studies in Romanticism, 3 (1964), p. 112.
9. Enscoe, p. 405.
10.
Nurmi, p. 110.
11.
Frye, Fearful, pp. 207-35; Nurmi, p. 109.
12.
Frye, Fearful, pp. 397, 399.
13.
Enscoe, p. 405.
14.
Frye, Fearful, p. 72.
15.
Bouwer, p. 187.
16.
Enscoe, p. 406.
17.
Bouwer, p. 187.
18.
Bouwer, p. 187.
19.
Paley, p. 97.
20.
Hazard Adams, "The Mental Traveller," in Adams, William
Blake:
A Reading of the Shorter Poems (Seattle: Univ. of
Washington,
1963), p. 100.
21.
Enscoe, p. 408.
22.
Enscoe, p. 408.
23.
Ault, p. 189.
24. Blake's
Apocalypse (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1963),
p. 294.
25.
"Annotations to Watson," E617.
26.
Nurmi, p. 114.
27.
E829.
28.
Frye, Fearful, p. 350.
29.
Nurmi, p. 115.
30.
Enscoe, p. 412.
31.
Enscoe, p. 413.
32.
Adams, "Mental," p. 100.