The Creation of Eve (Illustration to Milton's "Paradise Lost")

Years before he painted this, Blake had written that Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it. Around the time he made this sheet he was etching a long poem of his own called Milton, in which the dead poet comes back to earth, enters Blake through his left foot, and sets out to correct his own errors. This illustration follows Book Eight of Paradise Lost, where Adam tells the angel Raphael how Eve was made. God closed his eyes in sleep, Adam says, but left open the cell of fancy, his inner sight, so that he watched it happen as if in a trance. Blake lays Adam out asleep along the bottom of the sheet. Above him Eve rises upright, palms pressed together, while a tall robed figure lifts one hand over her head, and a thin crescent moon hangs in the dark sky. He signed it W Blake 1808 in the lower right corner.