"To Paradise, the Arabs say, Satan could never find the way Until the peacock led him in"
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Paradise doesn’t fall because evil is clever; it falls because beauty is persuasive. Leland’s couplet smuggles a moral fable into a travel-ready “Arab saying,” and the maneuver matters as much as the message. Satan, in this telling, isn’t the great strategist. He’s lost. What gets him through the gates is a peacock: the emblem of splendor, vanity, and courtly spectacle. The insinuation is sharp: corruption often enters dressed as ornament, escorted by something we’re conditioned to admire.
The peacock is also a social metaphor. It’s the creature of display, of status-signaling, of aesthetic excess. Leland implies that sanctuaries (religious, political, personal) aren’t breached by frontal assault so much as by our appetite for glamour and our trust in attractive intermediaries. The line “could never find the way” turns Paradise into a kind of moral maze; the threat isn’t force but misdirection. Temptation doesn’t need to overpower you if it can simply be shown in, smiling.
Context deepens the irony. Leland, a 19th-century American writer with a taste for folklore and the “exotic,” frames the thought as something “the Arabs say,” a common Victorian technique that lends aphorisms an aura of ancient, foreign authority. That gesture flatters Western readers while borrowing Eastern wisdom as atmosphere. The result is a compact parable about vanity and access, delivered through the period’s own vanity: the belief that moral insight is more convincing when it arrives in decorative costume.
The peacock is also a social metaphor. It’s the creature of display, of status-signaling, of aesthetic excess. Leland implies that sanctuaries (religious, political, personal) aren’t breached by frontal assault so much as by our appetite for glamour and our trust in attractive intermediaries. The line “could never find the way” turns Paradise into a kind of moral maze; the threat isn’t force but misdirection. Temptation doesn’t need to overpower you if it can simply be shown in, smiling.
Context deepens the irony. Leland, a 19th-century American writer with a taste for folklore and the “exotic,” frames the thought as something “the Arabs say,” a common Victorian technique that lends aphorisms an aura of ancient, foreign authority. That gesture flatters Western readers while borrowing Eastern wisdom as atmosphere. The result is a compact parable about vanity and access, delivered through the period’s own vanity: the belief that moral insight is more convincing when it arrives in decorative costume.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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