I’m rolling a little number about transgressive Victorians, especially Wilde and Swinburne. To tide you over until the time I fire it up I’ll share this delicious toke from the latter, who (I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to find out) had a lifetime fascination with serpents. In the coincidence department, Cleopatra was on last night and I watched in a daze, not really listening just digging Liz Taylor’s sublime corporeal manifestation:

Notice has not yet been accorded to the subtle and sublime idea which transforms Cleopatra’s death by the asp’s bite into a meeting of serpents which recognize and embrace, an encounter between the woman and the worm of the Nile, almost as though this match for death were a monstrous love-match, or such a mystic marriage as that painted in the loveliest passage of Salammbo, between the maiden body of the priestess and the scaly coils of the serpent, both made sacred to the moon; so closely do the snake and queen of snakes caress and cling. Of this idea Shakespeare also had a vague and great glimpse when he made Anthony murmur, Where’s my serpent of old Nile? mixing a foretaste of her death with the full sweet savor of her supple and amorous pride of life. For what indeed is lovelier and more luxuriously loving than a strong and graceful snake of the nobler kind?

– Algernon Swinburne