The infernal serpent; he it was, whose guile,
Stirr’d up with envy and revenge, deceiv’d
The mother of mankind.

These lines come from John Milton’s epic poem *Paradise Lost* (first published 1667; revised 1674), in which Milton retells the biblical story of the Fall with expansive theological and psychological detail. The speaker is describing Satan in the form of the serpent, emphasizing the motives—envy and revenge—that drive his deception of Eve (“the mother of mankind”). Milton wrote the poem after the English Civil Wars and the Restoration, when he was politically disgraced and blind; the work reflects his lifelong engagement with questions of obedience, free will, and the origins of evil, cast in the elevated style of classical epic.

Milton compresses the moral logic of the Fall into a vivid characterization: the serpent is “infernal,” not merely animal, and his “guile” is energized by passions—envy at humanity’s favored status and revenge against God. Calling Eve “the mother of mankind” heightens the stakes: the deception is not private but generational, affecting all human history. The passage also underscores Milton’s interest in agency and culpability: evil works through persuasion and rhetoric rather than brute force, making the Fall a tragedy of misdirected desire and mistaken judgment. The lines frame Satan as a calculating antagonist whose inner corruption expresses itself as outward deceit.