"The Mental Traveller" is a poem by William Blake

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...

. The poem is part of a collection of unpublished works called The Pickering Manuscript and was written in a manner that suggests the poem was to be read directly from the collection.

The poem deals with the cycle between society and liberty in the form of a male and female that grow older and younger in opposition to the other experiencing such changes. As a whole, the poem portrays conflicting ideas that make it difficult for the reader to attach to any given viewpoint.

Background

Blake's "The Mental Traveller" was not published and instead stayed as a manuscript. The poem was part of The Pickering Manuscript, a collection of 10 poems without illustrations and 8 are fair copies without corrections. Since they were written in this manner, they were copied into the manuscript in order to be read from the collection. The manuscript was owned by B. M. Pickering in 1866, for which the manuscript receives its name.

The poem was later translated multiple times. In September 1925 of the French magazine Navire focused on Blake and included a series of translations by Auguste Morel and Annie Hervieu which included a translation of the poem called "Le Voyageur mental". Later, "The Mental Traveller" was translated by Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda....

 into Spanish and published in 1935 in Visiones de las hijas de Albión y El viajero mental, de William Blake.

Poem

The poem begins with Liberty's 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. (lines 5–8)

Blake, within "The Mental Traveller" and other poems, returns to the Elizabethan reliance on metaphor, especially when he says:

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. (lines 9–12)

While crucified, the old woman is able to be healed. Eventually, liberty is able to free himself and joins with the old woman. Eventually, the two have a child, which is Intolerance:

Til from the fire upon the hearth

A little female babe doth spring.

And she is all of solid fire

And gems and gold, that none his hand

Dares stretch to touch her baby form,

Or wrap her in his swaddling band. (lines 43–48)

Intolerance and her lover are able to drive away Liberty as the world suffers. Eventually, he finds the old woman who is now a young girl. When they join together, he is made young but she flees from him. Eventually, they are able to come together and the earth is restored. However, as they do, he grows young and the woman grows old once more. As the poem ends, the cycle continues:

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. (lines 101–104)

Themes

The main focus within the poem is the development of liberty. Blake describes how liberty is established and disappears in a cyclical manner. The old woman within the poem represents society, the opposite to liberty. She crucifies liberty, a theme similar to what happens to Blake's character Orc

Orc (Blake)

Orc is a proper name for one of the characters in the complex mythology of William Blake. Unlike the medieval sea beast, or Tolkien's humanoid monster, his Orc is a positive figure, the embodiment of creative passion and energy, and stands opposed to Urizen, the embodiment of tradition.In Blake's...

, but liberty does break free and joins with her and they are able to enjoy plenty. However, they have a child, which represents the false church, an idea similar to Blake's character Rahab.

The poem operates in a cycle of conflicts between the sexes that cause many problems. In general, the poem is filled with a mixture of conflicting views that keeps the reader from being sentimentally attached to any viewpoints. This is reinforced by his grammatical structure of the poem in which the sense of words are both made and unmade. The ballads of the Pickering Manuscript, according to Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye

Herman Northrop Frye, was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century....

, were intended "to explore the relationship between innocence and experience instead of merely presenting their contrast as the two engraved sets do". This idea is most true about "The Mental Traveller" and "Auguries of Innocence".

Critical response

In an 1888 review called "Personal Peculiarities" in The London Standard, the reviewer claims that the poem "sounds like poetry, but it is the work of one writing by ear and ignoring all sense and meaning, like the tyro's first chaotic attempt to compose an oratorio. In the one case the obscurity comes from a too great amount of ideas, in the other from an almost total lack of these necessary articles.

In a 1922 review on Percy Shelley, the pseudonymous reviewer states "We learn more of the essence of [Blake's] soul-structure from Tiger, Tiger, The Crystal Cabinet, or The Mental Traveller than we do from his professedly 'prophetic' books. The English language, as understood by scholars and developed by them, is an instrument of doubtful value to the poet."

In 1990, Birdsall Viault argued that Blake "demonstrated his imaginative, sensitive, and mystical genius in such poems as 'The Lamb,' 'The Tiger,' and 'The Mental Traveller'."