Poem of the week: Of Human Knowledge by Sir John Davies

Of Human Knowledge

If aught can teach us aught, Affliction’s looks,

Making us look into ourselves so near,

Teach us to know ourselves beyond all books,

Or all the learned schools that ever were.


This mistress lately plucked me by the ear,

And many a golden lesson hath me taught;

Hath made my senses quick, and reason clear,

Reformed my will and rectified my thought.


So do the winds and thunders cleanse the air;

So working lees settle and purge the wine;

So lopped and pruned trees do flourish fair;

So doth the fire the drossy gold refine.


Neither Minerva nor the learned Muse
Nor rules of art, nor precepts of the wise,

Could in my brain those beams of skill infuse,

As but the glance of this dame’s angry eyes.


She within lists my ranging mind hath brought,

That now beyond myself I list not go;

Myself am centre of my circling thought,

Only myself I study, learn, and know.


I know my body’s of so frail a kind

As force without, fevers within, can kill;

I know the heavenly nature of my mind,

But ’tis corrupted both in wit and will;

Notes:
Minerva - Roman Goddess of Wisdom
The learned Muse - probably Clio, the Muse of History and founder of historical and heroic poetry.

This week’s “poem” is an extract from an extract, so a little context is useful. In 1594, Sir John Davies (1569-1626) brought together two meditative poems under the title Nosce Teipsum. This all-important loan translation is more precisely rendered “nosce te ipsum”. It’s the Latin version of the most famous Delphic maxim, strongly recommended by Socrates, γνῶθῐ σεαυτόν (Know Thyself). It states the theme of Davies’s diptych, the first poem of which is subtitled Of Humane Knowledge, and the second, The Soule of Man and the Immortalitie thereof. Our extract comprises, in modernised spelling, the last eight verses from Of Human(e) Knowledge.

Davies expresses severe disillusionment with the means and forms of that knowledge. Earlier in the poem, he sees “reason’s lamp” reduced to “a sparkle which doth lie / Under the ashes, half-extinct and dead.” It’s all very well, in the great age of exploration, to “acquaint ourselves with every zone” if we remain “unacquainted still with our own souls”.

And so Davies reaches his argument in favour of the cruel schoolmistress, Affliction. It’s useful to note the etymology. “To afflict” is derived from the Latin “affligere” – to knock against. Davies (both knocked against and knocking against others in the progress of his career) is clearly not simply advocating physical suffering, though not discounting it (see verse six of the extract). He makes a personal claim to the experience, the unidentified punishment he’s recently received, its effects culminating in a lively series of analogies in verse three.

Initially a lawyer, Davies had enrolled in the Middle Temple in 1588 and studied with John Donne (who would ultimately give his funeral oration). He is far more the lawyer in his poetry than Donne, I think: sharp and lucid, thoroughly rational, less flourishingly inventive. All the same, he enjoys some quiet verbal dexterity, especially when he juxtaposes the noun “looks” and the verb “look” in verse one, or the plural noun “lists” (denoting an enclosed field of combat) and “list” meaning “desire” or “choose”, in verse five. This verse powerfully describes the moment when the poet realises that “now beyond myself I list not go”. He seems to have found the moment when, centred on the self/soul instead of circling around it, the truest knowledge will be attained.

Once more Davies aligns himself with Socrates; at least, his conclusion seems similar to the philosopher’s reported disclaimer that all he knows is that he knows nothing. In a simple, memorable line, the poet recognises himself through antithesis: “I know I am one of nature’s little kings.” This is corroborated in the final verse, with its flat B-rhyme chime on “thing”: “I know myself a man / Which is a proud, and yet a wretched thing.” Davies, with all his control and lucidity, rightly does nothing to lighten the burden of such self-knowledge.

You can find Davies’s poems printed in their original spelling on the Luminarium website, which reveals the poet’s versatility of tone and form. It’s a fluency, never facile, expressed in sonnets, epigrams, and acrostics as well as major intellectual projects including Nosce Teipsum. There may well be something in Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate’s proposal that Davies is the rival poet featured in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.