Unveiling the Abyss: The Prefiguration of Existential Philosophy in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Sonnet “Lift not the Painted Veil”

Abstract

The poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley has risen from the nadir of its literary reputation and achieved increasing scholarly and critical acclaim since the latter half of the past century as a remarkable existence of world literature for its artistic, philosophical, cultural, social, and political relevance. However, while multitudinous scholars have dedicated themselves to unearthing the complexities of his works, Shelley's "Lift not the Painted Veil" remains a sonnet unfathomed by the cohort of researchers within the context of the intellectual discourse. This paper, based on the method of textual analysis, would propose against the traditional vein of scholarly analyses that the sonnet anticipates philosophies of existence by pinpointing its metaphysical meaning and significance. The conclusion is reached that this poem, in a reflection distinguished from the materialist or secular humanist culture, reveals the condition of individual existence-the crisis of Nietzschean nihilism-after the abolition of God's transcendental order, affirming its advent yet ending in negativity with nothing established as to how to cope with the crisis. Although the existentialist is antagonistic to the temper of the Romantic other-worldly dreamer, the fact that the preoccupation with the void pervades the work of such a visionary poet as Shelley implicates that the dichotomy between two apposed ideologies would be obliterated when confronted with the perennial problem of meaninglessness in existence.