Paradise Lost Lies and Deceit Quotes Page 1

Milton compares Satan to a giant creature that some "pilot" might mistake ("deeming some island") for an island; the point of the simile is that Satan seems like one thing (a heroic leader, an unjustly maligned angel), but is really another. In other words, he's a gigantic symbol of deception.

Milton here describes Belial; notice the rhetoric of "seeming." It is implied in the famous simile about the island (described above), and discussed more explicitly here. Belial is "false and hollow," a description that resonates nicely with the canon sequence (described below). Things are not always what they seem in this poem; in fact, they are often not what they "seem."

All of Satan's emotions are normally visible on his face, but here he shows his ability to display an "outward calm," even though he's as far from calm as one could get. The rhetoric of artificiality is quite patent here; we see it not only in "smoothed over," but also in "artificer." The latter contains the word "art" in it, suggesting that Satan is also some type of bad artist or something, or at least one that is more focused on the inauthentic than the natural.