The Song of Los

The Song of Los (written 1795) is one of William Blake's looks long beenpic poems, known as prophetic books. The poem consists of two sections, "Africa" and "Asia". In the first section Blake catalogues the decline of morality in Europe, which he blames on both the African slave trade and enlightenment philosophers. The book provides a historical context for The Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania, and The Book of Los, and also ties those more obscure works to The Continental Prophecies, "Europe" and "America". The second section consists of Los urging revolution.

During autumn 1790, Blake moved to Lambeth, Surrey. He had a studio at the new house that he used while writing what were later called his "Lambeth Books", which included The Song of Los in 1795. Like the others under the title, all aspects of the work, including the composition of the designs, the printing of them, the colouring of them, and the selling of them, happened at his home. Early sketches for The Song of Los were included in a notebook that contained images were created between 1790 until 1793.The Song of Los was one of the few works that Blake describes as "illuminated printing", one of his colour printed works with the coloured ink being placed on the copperplate before printed.

The pages of the work and images were 23 cm × 17 cm (9.1 in × 6.7 in) in size, the size of America a Prophecy and Europe a Prophecy, and the work was occasionally bound together with the other two works. Only six copies of the work survived, and the work was not listed along with Blake's other works that he sold in either 1818 or 1827. There were no mentions of the work by either Blake's contemporaries or his early biographer Alexander Gilchrist.

The work begins with a title page image of an empty, dead world with an old man looking at the title of the work. The story of the work begins in Africa with Los singing of Adam, Noah, and Moses and how they were granted laws by Urizen. This involve abstractions being granted to Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato, gospel being given to Jesus, a bible for Mahomet, and a book on war given to Odin. These caused the world to fail, as they were chains that bound the mind:

In the second half of the work, Asia, Orc creates fire in the mind that causes kings to be startled and an apocalypse of sorts to start:

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