WILLIAM BLAKE

Death, wearing a "kingly Crown," raises his flaming "Dart" with both hands and levels "his deadly aim" at Satan's head (2:672-73, 711-12). Milton describes Death as a "shadow," a figure "that shape had none" (2:667, 669). Most illustrators of the scene pictured him as a skeleton, but Blake indicates Death's insubstantiality by drawing his body in outline but revealing the background through his transparent flesh. Blake has thereby remained true to the text without turning away from his characteristic linear style and toward chiaroscuro techniques indicative of the "obscurity" which, for Edmund Burke, made Milton's description of Death an exemplar of the sublime. The strong diagonals formed by the combatants' weapons give linear expression to their conflict and focus attention on Sin, who rises to separate them. She is pictured with a voluptuous torso, but below her loins are the tails of two serpents coiling "in many a scaly fold/Voluminous and vast" and the heads of three "Hell Hounds…/With wide Cereberean mouths" (2:650-51, 654-55). Her "fatal Key" to "Hell Gate" (2:725) dangles to the right of Death's right calf. Above and behind Satan are two archways, suggesting that he has already passed through two groups of the "thrice threefold" gates and has come to the last set "of Adamantine Rock" (2:645-46)