John Davies (poet)

This article is about the 16th-17th century poet and lawyer. For the 16th-17th-century poet and schoolmaster, see John Davies of Hereford.

Sir John Davies (16 April 1569 - 8 December 1626) was an English poet and lawyer, who became attorney general in Ireland and formulated many of the legal principles that underpinned the British Empire.

The Manor House, Lower Chicksgrove, birthplace of Sir John Davies (1569-1626). Photo by Andy Grice. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Geograph.org.

Life

Overview

Davies was the son of a lawyer at Westbury, Wiltshire. He was educated at Winchester and Oxford, and became a barrister of the Middle Temple, 1595. He was a member successively of the English and Irish Houses of Commons, and held various legal offices. In literature he is known as the writer of 2 poems: Orchestra: A poem of Dancing (1594); and Nosce Teipsum (Know Thyself), in 2 elegies (1) "Of Humane Knowledge" (2) "Of the Immortality of the Soul." The poem consists of quatrains, each containing a complete and compactly expressed thought. It was published in 1599. Davies was also the author of treatises on law and politics.

Youth and education

Davies was baptized on 16 April 1569, at Tisbury, Wiltshire, where his parents lived at the manor-house of Chicksgrove.

He was educated at Winchester College, and became a commoner of Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1585. In 1588 he entered the Middle Temple, and was called to the bar in 1595.

In his general onslaught on literature in 1599 the archbishop of Canterbury ordered to be burnt a notorious and now excessively rare volume, All Ovid’s Elegies, 3 Bookes, by C.M / Epigrams by J.D. (Middleburgh, 1590?), which contained posthumous work by Marlowe.

Davies' 1596 poem "Orchestra" was dedicated to the author’s “very friend, Master Richard Martin,” but in the next, year the friends quarrelled, and Davies was expelled from the society for having struck Martin with a cudgel in the hall of the Middle Temple. He spent the year after his expulsion at Oxford in the composition of his philosophical poem on the nature of the soul and its immortality — Nosce Teipsum ("Know thyself").

In 1601 Davies was restored to his position at the bar, after making his apologies to Martin, and in the same year he sat for Corfe Castle in parliament. James I received the author of Nosce Teipsum with great favor, and sent him in 1603 to Ireland as solicitor general, conferring the honor of knighthood upon him in the same year. In 1606 he was promoted to be attorney-general for Ireland, and created serjeant-at-arms.

Of the difficulties in the way of the prosecution of his work, and his untiring industry in overcoming them, there is abundant evidence in his letters to Cecil preserved in the State Papers on Ireland. A chief aim of his was to establish the Protestant religion firmly in Ireland, and he took strict measures to enforce the law for attendance at church. With the same end in view he took an active part in the “plantation” of Ulster.

About March 1608–9 he married Eleanor Touchet, daughter of George, baron Audley. She developed eccentricity, verging on madness, and wrote several fanatical books on prophecy.

In 1612 he published his prose Discoverie of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued untill the beginning of his Majesties’s happie raigne.[1] In the same year he entered the Irish parliament as member for Fermanagh, and was elected speaker after a scene of disorder in which the Catholic nominee, Sir John Everard, who had been installed, was forcibly ejected. In the capacity of speaker he delivered an excellent address reviewing previous Irish parliaments.

He resigned his Irish offices in 1619, and sat in the English parliament of 1621 for Newcastle-under-Lyme. With Sir Robert Cotton he was a founder of the Society of Antiquaries.

Davies was appointed lord chief justice in 1626, but died suddenly on December 8 before he could enter on the office. On 9 November 1626 Chief-justice Crew was discharged from his office for refusing to countenance the legality of the king's forced loans. Davies, who had strenuously supported the king's demands, was appointed his successor; but he never took possession of the office. On the night of 7 December 1626 he was at a supper-party given by Lord-keeper Coventry, and the next morning he was found in his bed dead of apoplexy.

Writing

Davies's charming fragment entitled Orchestra (1596) was written in praise of dancing. The poet, in the person of Antinoüs, tries to induce Penelope to dance by arguing that all harmonious natural processes partake of the nature of a conscious and well-ordered dance. He closes his argument by foreshadowing in a magic mirror the revels of the court of Cynthia (Elizabeth).

A.H. Bullen described Orchestra as "brilliant and graceful". The poem, formed in tiny octavos, reveals a typical Elizabethan pleasure: contemplating and trying to understand the relationship between the natural order and human activity.

His Epigrams, published in 1590, were burnt by orders of the Archbishop of Canterbury the following year. Although not devoid of wit, they were coarse enough to deserve their fate. It is probable that they were earlier in date of composition than "Orchestra"..

The style of Nosce Teipsum (1599) was entirely novel; and the stanza in which it was written — the decasyllabic quatrain with alternate rhymes — had never been so effectively handled. Its force, eloquence and ingenuity, the orderly and lucid arrangement of its matter, place it among the finest of English didactic poems.

In 1599 Davies also published a volume of 26 graceful acrostics on the words Elisabetha Regina, entitled Hymns to Astraea.

He produced no more poetry except his contributions to Francis Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody (1608). These were 2 dialogues which had been written as entertainments for the queen, and “Yet other Twelve Wonders of the World,” satirical epigrams on the courtier, the divine, the maid, &c., and “A Hymn in praise of Music.” 10 sonnets to Philomel are signed J.D., and are also assigned to Davies (Poetical Rhapsody, edited by A.H. Bullen, 1890).

Critical introduction

by Mary Augusta Ward

Sir John Davies belongs to that late Elizabethan circle of courtly poets which still gathered round the declining age of the great Queen with apparently as much personal devotion as the circle of Sidney and Spenser had gathered round her prime. His Nosce Teipsum, published in 1599, was dedicated

‘To that clear majesty which in the North

Doth like another sun in glory rise;’

and the Hymns to Astraea, which appeared in the same year, may be ranked as one of the most readable and freely written expressions of that complex sentiment toward the Queen of which each considerable Elizabethan poet became in turn the mouthpiece.

This later group is to be distinguished on the one hand from the earlier lyrical and pastoral school, and on the other from the great dramatic circle which crowds the foreground of this second period. Its production was reflective and philosophical, and only occasionally and subordinately either lyrical or dramatic. It testified to revolt against pastorals and love poetry, but no member of it was possessed of a sufficiently great or pliant genius to achieve any important triumph outside the older and well-worn fashions.

Lord Brooke in point of power reigns supreme among these philosophers in verse, but Sir John Davies’ Nosce Teipsum enjoyed a wider contemporary reputation than anything of Lord Brooke’s, and has been far more frequently read since. It is a strange performance, and is to be admired rather for the measure of victory it obtains over unfavourable conditions, than for any absolute poetical merits. Some handbook of Christian philosophy seems to have fallen in the author’s way during a year of retirement at Oxford,— possibly the De Natura Hominis of Nemesius, of which Wither published an English translation in 1636,— and the text suited a sobered mood, while it offered an opportunity for rehabilitating a reputation shaken by youthful folly and extravagance. Accordingly the Nosce Teipsum was produced, an "oracle expounded in two Elegies — (1) of Human Knowledge; (2) of the Soul of Man and the Immortality thereof."

It is an exposition in the verse of Gondibert and the Annus Mirabilis of what Davies himself calls the "received opinions," the orthodox metaphysic of his time, and treats such topics as "what the soul is;" "that the soul is more than the Temperature of the Humors of the Body;" "that the soul is created immediately by God;" "the vegetative or Quickening power;" "the power of sense, the Relations between wit and will," &c. &c. All these interminable and tremendous subjects are indeed handled with admirable clearness and brevity. Where Lord Brooke would have wandered on to unmeasured length, thinking his way from cloud to clearness with laborious sincerity, Sir John Davies, a man of far inferior temper and morale, plays the artist with his inartistic material, clearly foresees his end, maps out his arguments and "acclamations," and infuses just so much imagination and so much eloquence as will carry the subject to the ears it is intended to reach.

Hallam said of Nosce Teipsum that it scarcely contained a languid verse. It may be said of it with equal truth that it scarcely contains a verse of real energy, and that it shows not a spark of that genuine poetic gift which at rare intervals lightens the most heavy and formless of Lord Brooke’s Treatises.... The poem deals with an eternally poetic subject, the longings, griefs, and destiny of the soul, in such a way as to furnish one more illustration of the futility of "philosophical poetry,"— of the manner in which the attempt to combine poetry and science extracts all pathos and all influence from the most pathetic and the most potent of themes. From this judgment we may perhaps exclude the passages, quoted below, which deserve to live when the rest of Nosce Teipsum is forgotten.

"Orchestra" was a poem of the author’s youth, "a sudden rash half-capreol of my wit," as he calls it in the dedication. It is unfinished and immature in style, but there is considerable charm in its wandering fancifulness. The graceful and delicate verse beginning "For lo, the sea that fleets about the land" will remind a reader of well-known lines in the "Ancient Mariner." In some other passages Sir John Davies may be suggestively matched with modern poets. The resemblance of his 38th Epigram to Wordsworth’s "Power of Music" has been already pointed out, and a verse of another modern poem,—

  ‘We see all sights from pole to pole,
  And glance and nod and bustle by,
And never once possess our soul
    Before we die,’—

recalls a passage in the Elegy ‘Of Human Knowledge’:—

  ‘We that acquaint ourselves with every Zone,
  And pass both Tropics, and behold the Poles,
When we come home are to ourselves unknown,
  And unacquainted still with our own souls.’

Recognition

In political terms, Davies was significant in his work on constitutional law and in framing the terms of the Plantation of Ulster, a model that served the English crown as it extended its colonial reach in North America and elsewhere. In literary terms, he was a fine poet who lay quite neglected from the mid-17th century, until his cause was championed by T.S. Eliot.

His poem "Man" was included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.

Publications

Poetry

• Epigrammes and Elegies, by I.D. and C.M. (with Christopher Marlowe). Middleborough [London?]: 1590, 1599.
• Orchestra; or, A poeme of dauncing. London: J. Robarts, for N. Ling, 1596;
  • (edited by E.M.W. Tillyard). London: Chatto & Windus, 1945.
• Hymns of Astraea: In acrosticke verse. London: R. Field. for I. Standish, 1599.
• Nosce Teipsum: This oracle expounded in two elegies: 1. Of humane knowledge; 2. Of the soule of man, and the immortalitie thereof. London: Henry Ballard. for Iohn Standish, 1608.
  • A Poem on the Immortality of the Soul. Dublin: S. Hyde & J. Dobson, 1733;
  • The Original, Nature, and Immortality of the Soul. London: W. Rogers, 1697; Glasgow: R. & A. Foulis, 1749.
• The Poetical Works. London: T. Davies, 1773.
• Complete Poems (edited by Alexander Balloch Grosart). (2 volumes), London: Chatto & Windus, 1876. Volume I, Volume II
• Poems of Sir John Davies: In facsimile (edited by Clare Howard). New York, Columbia University Press, 1941.
• Poems of Sir John Davies (edited by Robert Krueger & Ruby Nemser). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1975.

Non-fiction

• The Question Concerning Impositions: Tonnage, poundage, prizage, customs, &c. London: S.G. for Henry Twyford & Rich. Marriot, 1656.
• Historical Relations; or, A discoverie of the true causes why Ireland was neuer entirely subdued, nor brought vnder obedience of the Crowne of England, vntill the beginning of His Majesties happie Raigne, James Ist. London: A. Millar, 1747; Dublin: Matt Williamson, 1751; Dublin: Richard Watts / Laurence Flin, 1761.
• A report of cases and matters in law, resolved and adjudged in the King's courts in Ireland. Dublin: Sarah Cotter, 1762.
• Historical Tracts. London: John Stockdale, 1786.

Collected editions

• Works in Verse and Prose (edited by Alexander Balloch Grosart). privately published, 1869.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets

References

• Canny, Nicholas P. (2001). Making Ireland British, 1580–1650. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-820091-9. 
• Dictionary of National Biography 22 vols. (London, 1921–1922).
• Shapiro, James (2005). 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-21480-0. 
• O'Donoghue, Fergus (January 1990). "Book Reviews: Modern European". Catholic Historical Review 76 (I). 
• Coates, Ben (April 2005). "Sir John Davies (1569–1626)". History Today 55 (4). 
• Rowse, A. L. (September 1976). "Sir John Davies in Literature and History". History Today 26 (9). 
• Johnson, Francis R. (September 1942). "The Poems of Sir John Davies (Book)". Modern Language Quarterly 3 (3). 

External links

Poems

• "Man"
• 2 poems by Davies: "Hymn to the Month of September," "To the Spring"
• Poems by John Davies at the Poetry Archive (2 poems)
• Sir John Davies ((1569-1626) info & 2 poems at English Poetry, 1579-1830
• Davies in The English Poets: An anthology: Extract from Orchestra: Antinous Praises Dancing before Queen Penelope
  • Extracts from Nosce Tipsium: The soul compared to a river, The soul compared to a virgin wooed in marriage
  • From Hymnes of Astraea, in Acrosticke Verse: "To the Spring," "To the Nightingale," "To the Month of September"
• Sir John Davies at PoemHunter (6 poems)
• Sir John Davies at Poetry Nook (32 poems)

Books

• The Works of Sir John Davies
• Sir John Davies at the Online Books Page
• Sir John Davies at Amazon.com

About

• Sir John Davies in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Sir John Davies at NNDB
• Davies, Sir John (1596-1626) in the Dictionary of National Biography
• Sir John Davies (1569-1626) at Luminarium

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.. Original article is at Davies, Sir John