#84 Tues (9/13/22) - "floated redundant" Milton's Paradise Lost
“So spake the enemy of mankind, enclosed
In serpent, inmate bad! and toward Eve
Addressed his way: not with indented wave,
Prone on the ground, as since; but on his rear,
Circular base of rising folds, that towered
Fold above fold, a surging maze! his head
Crested aloft, and carbuncle his eyes;
With burnished neck of verdant gold, erect
Amidst his circling spires, that on the grass
Floated redundant: pleasing was his shape
And lovely; never since of serpent-kind
Lovelier…”
Quoted in A.S. Byatt's The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye:
The phrase was, of course, not her own; she was, as I have said, a being
of a secondary order. The phrase was John Milton’s, plucked from the air,
or the circumambient language, at the height of his powers, to describe the
beauty of the primordial coils of the insinuating serpent in the Paradise
garden. Gillian Perholt remembered the very day these words had first
coiled into shape and risen in beauty from the page, and struck at her,
unsuspecting as Eve. There she was, sixteen years old, a golden-haired
white virgin with vague blue eyes (she pictured herself so) and there on the
inkstained desk in the dust was the battered emerald-green book, inkstained
too, and secondhand, scribbled across and across by dutiful or impatient
female fingers, and everywhere was a smell, still drily pungent, of hot ink
and linoleum and dust if not ashes, and there he was, the creature, insolent
and lovely before her.
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