Le Serpent — William Blake

The Serpent and the Fall

Le Serpent draws on two of the great wellsprings of William Blake's imagination — the Book of Genesis and John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667). The serpent, ancient symbol of temptation and transformation, coils through Blake's visionary world with the same ambiguity it carries in its source texts: at once destroyer and liberator, deceiver and revealer.

Blake's treatment of this primal scene is characteristically his own — neither purely biblical nor purely Miltonic, but filtered through his own radical theology, in which the Fall is never simply a catastrophe but always also a beginning. The work is a testament to Blake's lifelong dialogue with the great texts of Western civilization, which he read not as fixed authorities but as living provocations.

About William Blake

William Blake (1757–1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker whose visionary imagination placed him entirely outside the conventions of his time. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, he is now considered one of the most original and profound figures of the Romantic Age.

Print Details

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