John Davies' "Nosce Teipsum: of Human Knowledge"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2025

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

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.

Today’s poem is Davies’ lengthy meditation on what man can know and what he could stand to learn. Happy reading.

Poet and lawyer Sir John Davies was born in Wiltshire and educated at Winchester College and Queen’s College, Oxford, though historians disagree about whether he graduated. In 1588, he enrolled in the Middle Temple, where he studied with John Donne, and was called to the bar in 1595. In addition to his legal study, Davies wrote poetry, notably Orchestra, or, A Poeme of Dancing (1596). Davies’s other works include a series of epigrams drawn from his youthful misadventures; Nosce teipsum (1594), a poetic treatise on the immortality of the soul; and Hymnes of Astraea in Acrosticke Verse (1599),an acrostic poem spelling the words Elisabetha Regina. Davies also contributed poetic dialogues to Francis Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody(1602). His Collected Poems appeared in 1622. It is thought that Davies accompanied King James to Scotland after Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603. Eventually knighted by the king, Davies was made solicitor general for Ireland and emerged as a champion of legal reform in Ireland. He attempted to lay the grounds for a strong civil society, albeit one that benefited England and English rule in all cases. Davies helped cement pro-English property laws and advocated the expulsion of Catholic priests to shore up Protestantism. He was appointed speaker in the Irish Parliament in 1613 and presided over the first Protestant majority. He returned to England and served in the Parliament of 1621. Charles I appointed Davies lord chief justice in 1626, but he died just before officially taking office. John Donne gave his funeral oration. Davies was buried in St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:08.4	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, January 15th, 2025.
0:14.6	Today's poem is by the Elizabethan poet John Davies, Sir John Davies.
0:28.7	And it's one half of a two-part poem. He conceived of this longer poem called Noske te Ipsum, which is the Latin form of the ancient Greek maxim, Notheseyftone, which originates from the Delphic
0:43.3	Oracle, reported leaves inscribed upon the temple there at Delphi. This is also the favorite
0:50.6	maxim of Socrates, because it is in the imperative mood and instructs us to know
0:57.2	thyself. So this poem, Nosegate Ipsum, is devoted to the idea of self-knowledge. The first part,
1:06.5	then, is entitled of human knowledge, and it is devoted to a lengthy meditation on human knowledge.
1:13.6	Not only what humans can know, but also, more importantly, what we choose not to know and how we come to know anything at all.
1:23.3	The second part of the poem, Noske-Tyipsum, is entitled of the soul of man and the immortality thereof.
1:33.1	And it's significant and intriguing that Davies believed we couldn't really have a conversation about that weighty subject until we have wrapped our mind, no pun intended, around the topic of human knowledge,
1:50.4	especially when we are capable of knowing so much as Davy sees it and yet fail to know what is
1:59.4	most important or use the knowledge we arrive at in silly or ineffectual ways.
2:07.8	He gives his examples, man's scientific breakthroughs in studying the natural world,
2:13.2	coming to know and understand the movement and the motion of the spheres,
2:17.1	and yet missing out on coming to an understanding of ourselves.
2:23.3	And this is in the 15 and 1600s that he's saying this.
2:27.3	Imagine if he could see a world today in which we have the ability even to create artificial selves, if you are willing to call them that,
2:36.6	and yet have not come any closer to understanding ourselves or have not become any more willing to try.
2:46.2	This first part of his poem is somewhat lengthy, so I hope you'll bear with me because I'm
2:51.9	going to read it in its entirety.
2:53.4	I thought about trying to make excerpts, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.
	...

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