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