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Veil Not The Painted Veil Analysis

Decent Essays

"Lift not the painted veil", an 1818 sonnet by the British Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, depicts a world covered by a "painted veil". Even though this veil presents "unreal shapes", everybody accepts it as it is, except for one individual lifting it to seek love. However, this act plunges him into a state of disorientation and forlornity, since it has not lead him to discover truth or love. Therefore the sonnet's admonitory first line strongly discourages us from lifting the veil. By focussing on the connotatively contrasting use of metaphors, this essay aims at demonstrating how Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet "Lift not the painted veil", despite its deceptive, seemingly admonitory first line, actually encourages the individual to defy religion and to adopt atheism. In order to describe the nature of the world, the lyrical subject of the sonnet uses dark and negative metaphors, which present the world as a "painted veil" (l. 1) and as a "gloomy scene" (l. 13). This symbol of …show more content…

12) forming an "unheeding many" (l. 11). The people living this veiled life are described as "shadows" (l. 12), part of an "unheeding many" (l. 11). This not only shows that humans, like life, are mere shadows, mere images, but also that they are careless with regard to this: even if they knew that the images presented on the veil do not correspond with real life, they would not care, but would remain "unheeding", careless.

These dark and grim metaphors might hide a deeper meaning, for in his essay "The Necessity of Atheism", Shelley compared religion and God to a "veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves" (Shelley ?) The fact that Shelley compared religion to a veil gives a whole new interpretation to this poem. The poem can thus be interpreted as

The nature of the metaphors with which the lyrical subject of the sonnet presents the nature of our world are grim and

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