Ways of Escape: Blake's "Mental Traveller"

This essay is chapter 6 in Mark Trevor Smith, "All Nature is but Art": The Coincidence of Opposites in English Romantic Literature (Locust Hill Press, 1993)

    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 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 Milton:

   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 'Eternal Circle' demanding a full     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 Eden, but also the actual reality of Eden is inseparable from 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)

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 & 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.

    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:

    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 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 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 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

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

    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

    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 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      

    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

    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, 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.

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 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

    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.