“I don’t understand how you pray for your neighbor, and then prey on your neighbor with policies that literally crush the poor.” Senator Rafael Warnock

He then cited a passage from the Bible to give even more weight to his comment: “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” Ezekiel 16:49

William Blake’s prophetic poem America, a Prophecy (see below for a reading), seems like an appropriate subject to discuss as we approach July the fourth in this semiquincentennial year. Blake is known for his popular poems like The Tyger found in his Songs of Innocence and Experience. He is not as well known for his prophetic poems like America.

His prophetic books include works he produced between 1789 and 1820 that are much more difficult to understand. He developed a complex mythology complete with a long list of characters that must be understood if one is to make sense of these prophetic works. Many of the characters are explained online at the William Blake Archive. A thorough list can be found in A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols Of William Blake by S. Foster Damon.

At first glance, the prophetic books can seem impossibly complex and abstruse but once you get into the swing of things they become comprehensible and quite relevant to America as we reach the 250th anniversary of our independence.

Take, for example, the following passage from William Blake’s America, A Prophecy. Note the similarities between Warnock’s statement and Blake. [Note: the Angels refer to the 13 colonies, Orc represents revolutionary energy, Albion’s Angel represents Samuel Adams]

Fiery the Angels rose, and as they rose deep thunder roll’d

Around their shores, indignant burning with the fires of Orc;

And Boston’s Angel cried aloud as they flew thro’ the dark night.

He cried: `Why trembles honesty; and, like a murderer,

Why seeks he refuge from the frowns of his immortal station?

Must the generous tremble, and leave his joy to the idle, to the pestilence

That mock him? Who commanded this? What God? What Angel?

To keep the gen’rous from experience till the ungenerous

Are unrestrain’d performers of the energies of nature;

Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science

That men get rich by; and the sandy desert is giv’n to the strong?

What God is he writes laws of peace, and clothes him in a tempest?

What pitying Angel lusts for tears, and fans himself with sighs?

What crawling villain preaches abstinence and wraps himself

In fat of lambs? No more I follow, no more obedience pay!’

Those last two lines are enough to get one’s blood boiling regardless of one’s political views. “Throw the bastards out!” has been a rallying cry throughout the history of America. The poem in its entirely describes the American revolution as Blake saw it. He was a radical sympathizer. He supported both the American and French revolutions as expressions of human liberation from tyranny. However, he distrusted purely political readings, always embedding revolution within a spiritual and cosmic framework. Even a great political party with the most admirable of goals (right or left, red or blue) can and most likely will abandon those goals to maintain power.

William Blake’s “Orc Cycle” is a recurring mythological narrative of rebellion that maps the stages of human history and psychology. It describes a perpetual pattern where fiery, youthful energy (Orc) sparks political and spiritual revolution only to calcify over time into the same oppressive, rationalistic tyranny (Urizen) it initially overthrows.

Blake used this cyclical wheel to express his profound disappointment with historical revolutions. He observed that the French and American Revolutions, while promising liberty, eventually led to new emperors (e.g., Napoleon) and continued imperialism. The cycle illustrates his belief that mere political rebellion is trapped on a “wheel of life.” To achieve true liberation, humanity must break free from the materialist mindset entirely.

Blake was not a fatalist. The entire purpose of his prophetic books was to provide what he believed was the actual exit from the Orc Cycle. That exit was not better politics. It was a transformation of perception itself.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is infinite.

Blake described four basic ways of seeing, and he believed most people spend their lives stuck in the lowest one without realizing it.

Single vision is the most basic level. One sees only the physical surface of things, the world as dead matter governed by mechanical law. Blake associated this with Newton’s science taken to its narrowest extreme: a tree is just wood and chlorophyll, nothing more. He called this “Newton’s sleep” not because Newton was foolish, but because stopping at this level of seeing is a kind of slumber.

Twofold vision adds emotional and imaginative response on top of the physical. Now the tree isn’t just wood, it stirs something in you, reminds you of something, moves you. This is ordinary poetic or emotional perception, richer than single vision but still fairly contained.

Threefold vision is the realm of dream, deep imagination, and the unconscious. It is perception that touches the mythic and symbolic, where the tree might become a doorway into memory, desire, or vision in a fuller, more unbound sense.

Fourfold vision is the highest state, full, unified perception where the physical, emotional, imaginative, and divine all merge into a single act of seeing. This is the famous “world in a grain of sand” (see Auguries of Innocence), not metaphorically, but actually perceiving the infinite within the finite object, without separating spirit from matter at all. It’s not escaping the physical world for some other plane; it’s seeing this world so completely that it becomes luminous, sacred, fully alive.

Blake believed in a real exit. He was not writing tragedy where the wheel simply turns forever and wisdom consists of accepting it as in Camus’s Sisyphus. He believed it would take a new system to find a real exit. He did his best to create such a system:

“I must Create a System, or be enslaved by another Man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” [Jerusalem: Emanation of the Giant Albion]

Blake watched the American Revolution and then the French Revolution with genuine hope, then watched the French Revolution devolve into the Terror followed by Napoleon within a few years. This was not an abstract theory for him. It was a real time demonstration that political revolution alone, however justified its grievances, ultimately produces a new Urizen. America, a Prophecy ends without resolution specifically because Blake already sensed the same old pattern forming.

Political revolution is necessary but not sufficient. It can break specific chains such as slavery, monarchy, and tyrannies. Those victories are real and matter enormously. But, political revolution cannot, by itself, break the cycle. The cycle is not fundamentally about who holds power. It’s about a more basic fracture in human perception: the splitting of reason from energy, body from soul, the individual from the divine humanity in others. Until that fracture is healed, every successful revolution will eventually generate its own version of Urizen, because the people who made it weren’t transformed at the level where the cycle actually originates, in those mind-forg’d manacles Blake speaks of in his writings (as in London).

Blake was neither a naive optimist nor a despairing fatalist. He believed the breaking of the cycle was possible. His art was a genuine attempt to do so. He was far too honest to claim he’d witnessed it succeed. America ends with Urizen’s hollow voice still lamenting, not defeated. His later prophecies show the cycle continuing to grind, written by a man in his sixties, in poverty and obscurity, who had watched almost every revolutionary hope of his lifetime disappoint him.

It’s worth being honest about what Blake would not do: he would resist being drafted as a straightforward partisan. He was not a party man. He distrusted all institutional power, all organized religion used as political control, and all systems, including revolutionary ones, that claimed final authority over human life and imagination. He celebrated the American Revolution not because it created a better government but because it temporarily broke the spell of inevitability around inherited power.

His question for any era, including ours, is always the same: are human beings becoming more imaginatively free, more fully themselves, or are new chains being forged, however loudly their forgers claim to be liberating us?

That question, posed in 1793, remains searingly alive today.

Blake thought the cycle’s mechanism of divided perception generating divided power generating divided perception could in principle be broken by sufficiently total imaginative awakening. He devoted his entire life’s work in an attempt to encourage that awakening, plate by plate, poem by poem, in himself and in anyone willing to read him with open senses.