America: A Prophecy is a narrative poem consisting of two parts, a thirty-seven-line section titled "Preludium" and a longer, 226-line section entitled "A Prophecy." It is written in long, unrhymed lines that seem to have been inspired in their shape both by the epic meter of Homer and by the iambic pentameter of John Milton, but that conform to neither.
The poem takes the American Revolution as its inspiration, but, even though George Washington and other founding fathers appear in it, the poem is by no means an attempt to write a history of the event. Rather, this poem is an attempt to create an extended metaphor glorifying the spirit of the revolution.
In
America, William Blake is developing a cosmology of deities, some of whom had appeared in his earlier poems and many of whom were to appear in later ones, such as the poem "The Four Zoas." When the poem begins, Orc, a deity associated with fire and rebellion, based very much on the myth of Prometheus, has been chained by Urthona, who is a blacksmith and associated with the earth. He is being fed by the virgin daughter of Urthona, a sympathetic spirit also associated with the earth. Inspired by her presence, Orc breaks free of his chains to embrace her; she, in turn, is inspired to speak for the first time, and, at the end of this prelude, tells him of the struggle under way on "my American plains."
The main section of the poem, "A Prophecy," concerns the struggle between the Angel of Albion (England) and a number of characters and deities associated with the American colonies. George Washington early makes an impassioned speech to warn Americans that the Angel of Albion is on his way to imprison them, but after that, he and the other founding fathers named in the poem (including Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine) have little to do. Most of the battle is between Orc and the Angel of Albion.
Orc arrives in a fiery burst to intervene between the Angel of Albion and the American colonists. The Angel of Albion recognizes him and demands to know what he is doing. Orc declares that he is defending the principle that "everything that lives is holy" against the idea that lives can be ranked according to their importance, which he sees the Angel of Albion as trying to enforce.
Beginning in line 76, the Angel of Albion tries to rally his "Thirteen Angels," representing the spirits of the original thirteen colonies. Led by Boston’s Angel, who refuses to pay any more obedience to Albion, the Thirteen Angels throw down their scepters and stand united with Washington and other founding fathers. In line 142, the human governors of the thirteen colonies meet and, unable to break the mental chains binding them to England, surrender to Washington rather than join him.
The Angel of Albion sends plagues to defeat the colonies of America, but Orc intervenes and sends the plagues back onto the English. The plagues defeat the Angel of Albion, and Blake shows what he thinks of the official English poetry of his day by having a "cowl" of flesh and scales grow over the Bard of Albion (a stand-in for any of several British poet laureates of Blake’s lifetime), who has hidden in a cave.
Then Urizen, at this point the most powerful of Blake’s deities, appears. Urizen is described as old, pale, and bearded, and in this poem is associated with clouds and ice. He puts a stop to the revolt against Albion by trapping Orc in a white cloud for twelve years—possibly referring to the period between the end of the American Revolution and the execution of the king of France in 1793. The poem ends with a prophecy of the time when the five gates, meaning the five senses, will be burned away and mankind will be able to perceive infinity directly, the ultimate outcome Blake sees to the French and American revolutions.