Prefatory Note to 'The Mental Traveller'
A passage in Blake's description of his picture of the Last Judgement (MS. Book, c. 1810) supplements the clue supplied by the author's title to the meaning of this most obscure poem. Referring to the three 'States' or 'Churches,' symbolized by the twenty-seven 'Heavens' enumerated in Jerusalem, f. 75—Adam to Luther, 'After which Adam begins again in endless circle'—Blake adds:—
'These states exist now. Man passes on, but states remain for ever. He passes through them like a traveller, who may well suppose that the places he has passed through exist no more; as a man may suppose that the states he has passed through exist no more. Everything is eternal.'
The same idea is repeated in Jerusalem, f. 49, 11. 72-74:—
'Learn therefore, O Sisters, to distinguish the Eternal Human,
That walks about among the stones of fire, in bliss & woe
Alternate, from those States or Worlds in which the Spirit travels.'
The poem, then, must be understood as a picture of man's spirit, passing through successive mental states, and at last returning, 'in endless circle,' to the point from which he started. In other words it is a restatement of Blake's favourite doctrine of constant generation and regeneration.
In my footnotes to 'The Mental Traveller' I give references to passages in the Prophetic Books, throwing light upon allusions otherwise unintelligible. While these, read with their context, render plain the sense of the particular lines or stanzas to which they are appended, it should be premised that the chapters quoted from will not supply the reader with a consecutive narrative of the exact myth presented in this poem. The complete picture must be pieced together from the fragments discovered and identified. The myth itself admits of no glib paraphrase, for Blake's parables, as he himself insists, are 'visions' and not 'allegories.' Such figures, moreover, as 'catching shrieks in cups of gold' are in the nature of ideograms, used invariably in the same sense and the same connexion, and must always be understood symbolically and not metaphorically. Difficult to define precisely, or to separate from their context, they serve as useful catchwords to more detailed expositions of the same myth elsewhere.
In bringing together these parallelisms from the Prophetic Books I allow Blake to be his own interpreter. Those who prefer a shorter cut to a meaning—if not to his meaning—may turn to Mr. W. M. Rossetti's ingenious exposition, first printed in Gilchrist (ii. 98) and repeated in the Aldine edition. Swinburne's commentary on this poem will be found on pp. 178-181 of his Critical Essay, and Messrs. Ellis and Yeats' interpretation as 'at the same time a sun-myth and a story of the Incarnation' on pp. 34-36 of the second volume of their large edition of Blake's Works.
