The Soul Hovering over the Body Reluctantly Parting with Life,

1805–08

In 1805 the London publisher Robert Hartley Cromek commissioned Blake to design and engrave a series of fifteen illustrations for a deluxe edition of The Grave, a poem by Robert Blair (Scottish, 1699–1746). While Blake did provide Cromek with twenty original watercolors for the project, the job of engraving the plates after his designs fell to the then-fashionable engraver Luigi Schiavonetti. The Grave (1743) epitomizes the late-eighteenth-century taste for “Graveyard Poetry,” morbid meditations on death, burial, and the afterlife. In this etching—as in the poem—the hovering soul of a deceased voluptuary laments her departure from the lifeless corpse on his deathbed. When the image was published in 1808 the following lines were added below:
. . . How wishfully she looks
On all she’s leaving, now no longer hers!