As one who, long in populous city pent, Forth issuing on a summer's morn to breathe Among the pleasant villages and farms Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight— The smell of grain, of tedded grass, of kine, Of dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound— If chance with nymph-like step fair virgin pass, What pleasing seemed, for her now pleases more, She most, and in her look seems all delight. Such pleasure took the Serpent to behold This flowery plat, the sweet recess of Eve Thus early, thus alone.
The original serpent did not creep on the ground, but was a handsome creature.
With burnished neck of verdant gold, erect Amidst his circling spires, that on the grass Floated redundant. Pleasing was his shape And lovely.
Appearing before Eve with an air of worshipful admiration, and speaking in human language, the arch-deceiver gains her ear with flattery. "Empress of this fair world, resplendent Eve." She asks how it is that man's language is pronounced by "tongue of brute." The reply is that the power came through eating the fruit of a certain tree, which gave him reason, and also constrained him to worship her as "sovran of creatures." Asked to show her the tree, he leads her swiftly to the Tree of Prohibition, and replying to her scruples and fears, declares—
"Queen of the Universe! Do not believe Those rigid threats of death. Ye shall not die. How should ye? By the fruit? It gives you life To knowledge. By the Threatener? Look on me— Me who have touched and tasted, yet both live And life more perfect have attained than Fate Meant me, by venturing higher than my lot. Shall that be shut to Man which to the Beast Is open? Or will God incense his ire For such a petty trespass?... God therefore cannot hurt ye and be just. Goddess humane, reach, then, and freely taste!" He ended; and his words replete with guile Into her heart too easy entrance won.
Eve herself then took up the argument and repeated admiringly the Serpent's persuasions.
"In the day we eat Of this fair fruit our doom is we shall die! How dies the Serpent? He hath eaten and lives, And knows, and speaks, and reasons, and discerns, Irrational till then. For us alone Was death invented? Or to us denied This intellectual food, for beasts reserved? Here grows the care of all, this fruit divine, Fair to the eye, inviting to the taste, Of virtue to make wise. What hinders then To reach and feed at once both body and mind?"
So saying, her rash hand in evil hour Forth-reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she ate.
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat, Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe That all was lost. Back to the thicket slunk The guilty serpent.