In 1794 Blake engraved his _Europe: A Prophecy_, which is the last of his poems dealing with contemporaneous political events.
Europe stood for Blake in his rebellious mood as the symbol of tradition, authority, science, religion. It was the dead past. "Enitharmon slept eighteen hundred years. Man was a dream, the night of Nature and their harps unstrung." Europe, during this long sleep, was without vision, inspiration, art, and true nature. Her religion, divorced from art, was repressive, and existed by trading on men's fears. Falling under the tyranny of the five senses, she believed only so much as the senses could testify of; hence she was rational, utilitarian, unimaginative, and joyless. She squinted so abominably with such eyes as she had that she saw nothing as it was. God, man, nature, became creations of man's perverted reason, and God was used as an efficient policeman to keep insurrectionary nations in subjection and vital men in order.
But Blake believed that he had already seen the morning star that heralded the full blaze of the Sun. Already the invisible powers who control nations and men were stirring and preparing for their last fearful conflict, which should result in new heavens and a new earth. The angels were at war. Urizen and his many sons were tightening their sinews for the last life-and-death grip; against them was Orc, the horrent demon, "already a kindled and quenchless fire, Los, the spirit of inspiration far more nearly allied with fiery passion (Orc) than with cold intellectual reason (Urizen), Los' wife Enitharmon and their many sons and daughters, Rintrah, Palamabron, Elynittria and Ocalythron. These Ossianic and Miltonic principalities and powers were waging huge and terrific war in the heavenly places, and already on earth was kindled in France the earthly counterpart and shadow of the invisible horrible conflict.
The work of regeneration, once begun, could not be arrested. Passion, fire, energy, all the irresistible things pent up in hell, were let loose; and they would involve Europe and the world in an ocean of blood. The whole cosmos, inward in the heavens, outward in the sun, moon, stars, and earth, was dyed in crimson, until the tribulation such as was not since the world began should work up to the grinding pains of labour, and in infinite pain there should come to the birth the new age of which the prophets and poets had dreamed in all ages.