Blake's prophetic texts frequently associate revolution and sexual liberation. In America (1793), the patriots’ rebellion issues in a moment of erotic apocalypse:

The retreat of the priests from Orc's fires parallels the reddening of the limbs and resurrection of ‘female spirits of the dead’. This eruption of female desire amid Orc's ‘red flames fierce’ melts the heavens, revealing Urizen's ‘leprous head / From out his holy shrine’ (16:1–4, E57). His attempt to dampen and obscure the ardour of revolution using his ‘tears in deluge piteous’, ‘stored snows’ and ‘clouds & cold mists’ (16:4, 9, 13, E57) continues a symbolic pattern present throughout Blake's oeuvre, in which the fires of desire contend with ice, stone and clouds. David Erdman links the opening ‘doors of marriage’ to the 1781 crisis in marriage law, whereby the wording of the Marriage Act of 1751 potentially made thirty years' of weddings illegitimate and thereby undermined the authority of the priests who had carried them out; he also points to Charles James Fox's attempts to liberalize marriage law in this year.