Thus the red damask curtains which now shut out the fog-laden, drizzling atmosphere of the Marylebone Road, had cost a mere song, and yet they might have been warranted to last another thirty years. A great bargain also had been the excellent Axminster carpet which covered the floor; as, again, the arm-chair in which Bunting now sat forward, staring into the dull, small fire.
A similar piece of cloth that separates the audience and the stage in a theater.
c. 1593, (w), (w), Act II, Scene 2, http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=titus&Scope=entire&pleasewait=1&msg=pl
And, after conflict such as was supposed / The wandering prince and Dido once enjoy'd, / When with a happy storm they were surprised / And 'curtaind' with a counsel-keeping cave, / We may, each wreathed in the others arms, / Our pastimes done, possess a golden slumber;
But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty; whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man.
1958, (w), The (w), translated by (w), New York: Viking, Book IV, Perseus, p. 115,
He saw a rock that pierced the shifting waters / As they stilled, now curtained by the riding / Of the waves, and leaped to safety on it.
2003, (w), The Liberated Bride (2001), translated by (w), Harcourt, Part 2, Chapter 17, p. 115,