Doc Yoder's Notes
America a Prophecy by William Blake (1793)

• Full page image; winged giant sits, face down, arms chained, in the breach of a wall; a nude woman clutches a child in her lap, with another child standing beside her with its head obscured in her lap; clouds in the sky.

• In clouds between "AMERICA" and "PROPHECY": facing left, a woman and child reading, with a second child sitting with its back to the woman; facing right, an old (?) man reading (?), with one male (?) youth at his back pointing to "AMERICA" and a nude female in front of him flying away
• At the bottom of the plate, a woman kisses the body of a slain man, with other corpses under them

• Gothic scene in which the "shadowy daughter of Urthona" brings to food to Orc who is in chains; she cannot speak "till that dread day when Orc assay'd his fierce embrace"
• Orc addresses her, identifying himself as an eagle, a lion, a whale, and a serpent
• Orc breaks free and seizes the "panting struggling womb"; she joys and smiles "her first-born smile"
• The heretofore shadowy female speaks, associating Orc with Christ and herself with the "American plains"; she associates the animals with which Orc had identified with various parts of the Americas, and describes the revolution as "eternal death" and the "torment long foretold"

• Intro the Guardian Prince of Albion
• Intro the American heroes who see a bended bow and iron chain in the sky binding them; Washington speaks
• Albion's Prince appears as a dragon over the sea, seen from America

• Wheels of blood and red clouds as a "Wonder" (Orc) rises over the Atlantic to face Albion's Prince
• The King of England trembles

• Albion's Prince and "the terror" (Orc) face off; Orc is compared to a comet or to the planet Mars, with the remnant of undeveloped mythology about the sun's being "rent from [Mars's] red sphere"
• The "spectre" (Orc or the Prince?) glows, staining the temple, and a voice (Orc's?) is introduced that shakes the temple

• The voice speaks, with images of rebirth and Christ's resurrection (ll. 37-41)
• The images of resurrection are followed by images of the liberation of slaves, the opening of dungeons, as if awakening from a dream of bondage
• The voice quotes the singing of the freed slaves, about a "fresher morning" and the "clear and cloudless night; / For empire is no more"

• Albion's Prince accuses Orc, identifying him as the red dragon of Revelation, as "blasphemous demon, Antichrist, hater of dignities, / Lover of wild rebellion and transgressor of God's law"

• Orc identifies himself, and associates himself with Satan in the serpent
• He comes to bring the new morning, to return the "fiery joy" that "Urizen perverted to ten commands"; he comes to "stamp to dust" the "stony law" and "scatter religion abroad . . . as a torn book"
• Attack on sexual repression, "pale religious lechery"
• He asserts that "every thing that lives is holy . . . the soul of sweet delight can never be defiled"
• Orc recalls Daniel, and identifies the revolution with the fiery furnace and the furnace with "lustful fires"

• Albion's Angel speaks, but is not identified until after the speech; in Blake's illuminated plates, no marks (except the plate shift) differentiate between Orc's speech and that of Albion's Angel
• Albion's Angel issues a call to arms; his punishing demons are powerless in the face of Washington, Paine, and Warren
• Albion's Angel calls on his "thirteen Angels" for help
• Albion's Angel sees "a vision from afar" of an "abhorred birth," a "terrible birth"; he thinks it is revenge upon the "Devourer of thy parent" (Orc?, the revolutionaries?)
• The baby is depicted with "parched lips drop[ping] with fresh gore" and the Angel seems to suggest that the child is devouring its mother
• One last call to arms to the 13 angels

• Opens by identifying the voice on Pl. 9 as the Angel's weeping
• No trumpets answer the Angel's call from across the Atlantic
• The 13 Angels (now "perturbed") sit in Atlantis to guard America

• The 13 Angels of America rise in the air in the flames of Orc
• Boston's Angel "cries" asking why the gentle and generous tremble while before tyranny of the ungenerous, idle and pestilent, "Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science / That men get rich by"; he questions the authority a God who "writes laws of peace and clothes him in the tempest"; ends, "No more will follow, no more obedience pay!"
• This is Blake's imagined version of the revolutionary town meetings in the colonies

• The 13 Angels, led by Boston, throw down their sceptre's on America and descend in flames
• They stand by the American heroes and all are wrapped in the flames (of Orc?, the "demon red"), "rejoicing in its terror"; the flames are explicitly compared to a furnace (cf. the fiery furnace of Daniel)

• The thirteen Governors meet and shake their "mental chains" (cf."London": "mind-forged manacles"), but still "grovel and writhe"
• The British soldiers throw down their weapons and run from the flames and vision of Orc
• Albion's Angel, enraged, burns across the sky, surveys his "numerous hosts" (40 million) on the Atlantic mountains, armed with diseases

• The American heroes hear the battle cry of Albion's Angel
• Albion's plagues attack America like a tidal wave (cf. the ten plagues of Moses in Egypt)
• America is about to be overwhelmed ("and earth had lost another portion of the infinite" [175]), but the colonies rush together, and with the flames of Orc, force the plagues to recoil onto Albion

• Bristol and London explicitly are mentioned as victims of the recoiling plague
• As Albion sickens with disease, the English "millions" disarm, Albion's Guardian convulses, and even Ireland, Scotland, and Wales are infected by Orc's "fires of hell" (192)
• The Bard of Albion is infected with the plague, and grows scales
• The doors of marriage and the scaly priests run for cover
• When the females are left alone and naked, freed from their fetters, their ancient desires renew (this part is represented in the illumination)

• As the frozen heavens begin to melt in the fires of Orc, Urizen himself emerges "his leprous head / From out his holy shrine"
• Urizen descends weeping and howling, and pours forth his snows on the scene, hiding Orc with clouds and cold mists, freezing the scene, for 12 years till "France receive[s] the demon's light"
• Seeing what has happened to Albion's bands ("smitten with their own plagues"), France, Spain, and Italy try to "shut the five gates of their law-built heaven," but Orc is too strong, and the gates and the very hinges are consumed in his flames