The Mental Traveller
I travel'd thro' a Land of Men, 1
A Land of Men & Women too;
And heard & saw such dreadful things
As cold Earth-wanderers never knew.
For there the Babe is born in joy 5
That was begotten in dire woe;
Just as we reap in joy the fruit
Which we in bitter tears did sow.
And if the Babe is born a Boy 9
He's given to a Woman Old,
Who nails him down upon a rock,
Catches his Shrieks in Cups of gold.
Pickering MS. p. 3.
1, 2 Cp. Jerusalem, f. 38, ll. 31-34:—
'My Streets are my Ideas of Imagination ...
My Houses are Thoughts; my Inhabitants, Affections,
The children of my thoughts, walking within my blood vessels.'
3 heard & saw] saw and heard EY.5 Cp. Jerusalem, f. 68, ll. 36, 37:—
'Breeding Women walking in pride & bringing forth under green trees
With pleasure, without pain, for their food is blood of the Captive.'
5-8 Cp. 'Auguries of Innocence,' ll. 67-70:—
'Every Tear from Every Eye
Becomes a Babe in Eternity;
This is caught by Females bright,
And return'd to its own delight';
where of course 'tear' is to be understood as the human emotion which gives rise to it. Cp. the line in another poem ('The Grey Monk') of this same manuscript collection:—
'For a Tear is an Intellectual Thing.'
8 Which] That EY.9 In Blake's prophetic writings the 'spectre,' or reasoning power in man, is always represented as masculine, in contradistinction to the 'emanation,' or affective self, which is feminine.11 The 'rock' is the druidical altar of Albion (Jerusalem, f. 53, l. 17, and passim), the place of torture of the victims of natural religion. See also Jerusalem, f. 67, and Four Zoas, Night vii, l. 71:—
'... my feet & hands are nail'd to the burning rock.'
12 Cp. Milton, f. 24, ll. 35-39:—
'The cruel joys of Luvah's Daughters lacerating with knives
And whips their Victims, & the deadly sport of Luvah's Sons.
They dance around the dying, & they drink the howl & groan,
They catch the shrieks in cups of gold, they hand them to one another,
These are the sports of love, & these the sweet delights of amorous play.'
