The Mental Traveller is a poem by William Blake. It is part of a collection of unpublished works called The Pickering Manuscript and was written in a manner that suggests the poem was to be read directly from the collection.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 is about travelling in the realm of the mind. Blake generalizes here "about the spiritual history of mankind out the experience of his own spiritual history." It can be also understood as a cycle history of relations between society and idea of 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
"The Mental Traveller" was not etched, printed or published by Blake 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. It was published for the first time in 1863 in the 2nd volume of Alexander Gilchrist's Life of William Blake, Pictor ignotus, p. 98-102, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti with the commentary of his brother William Michael Rossetti.
The poem was later translated multiple times. The September 1925 issue 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 into Spanish and published in 1935 in Visiones de las hijas de Albión y El viajero mental, de William Blake.
Poem
Hirsh considers the best comment on the universal implication of the poem is one of the earliest, written by W. M. Rossetti (1863):
There are 26 stanzas in the poem. The 1st one introduces the reader into the disturbing and even tragic realm of the mind or spirit, the land of Men and Women whose sexual distinction suggests also “the distinction between different sorts of spiritual ideals”:
The “cold Earth wanderers” who in their “Newton’s sleep” and the concerns of the physical world "are not aware of man's tragic spiritual history" seen by the poet, “an Olympian observer of the human spirit” and wanderer in its realm. The 2nd stanza explains the difference between the two realms. Here "the Babe is born in joy / That was begotten in dire woe", which is the opposite to natural phenomena. So, "the Idea, conceived with pain, is born amid enthusiasm." Damon considers this is the idea of Liberty:
Here is a paraphrase of Psalm 126:5: "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy." The 3rd stanza is the beginning the first story. "If of masculine, enduring nature, it falls under the control and ban of the already existing state of society (the woman old)." Blake, within "The Mental Traveller" and other poems, returns to the Elizabethan reliance on metaphor, especially when he says:
The “woman old” represents the earth, old fallen world that opposes to the new ideas, but the purpose of the “newborn boy” is to renew it, he is a new spiritual or religious ideal. So, "the old woman is therefore the type of the religious persecutor and also the type of fallenness and corruption." His persecution has the allusion to Prometheus, Jesus Christ as well as Dionysus, because old woman "nails him down upon a rock", and in the 4th stanza she "binds iron thorns around his head", "pierces both his hands & feet", and "cuts his heart out":
In the 5th stanza "Her fingers number every Nerve / Just as a Miser counts his gold." While crucified, the old woman is able to be healed. W. M. Rossetti commented: "As the Idea develops, the old society becomes moulded into a new society (the old woman grows young)":
In the 6th stanza the "purpose is accomplished", the world seems to be redeemed and "the terrestrial paradise has arrived":
Stanza 7. Now the idea becomes free and dominant. It united to society in a sort of matrimony:
Stanza 8. "It gradually grows old and effete, living now only upon the spiritual treasures laid up in the days of its early energy." The protagonist is "wandering round" without faith or goal, he lost his ideal: