The Selected Poems of Sir John Davies

The poetry of Sir John Davies is the answer to a question we haven’t even known to ask. But asking and answering that question is critical to regaining a proper understanding of who we are, truly, according to the fixed boundaries of Creation, and not our own delusions. We have, in the two great poems of Sir John Davies, a poetry of true meaning, telling us not only who we are but how we know as well. And the timing couldn’t be better.

Often overshadowed by the work of his more famous contemporaries, Spenser and Shakespeare, Davies’ poetry of meaning is due for a revival. His is a voice desperately needed in the midst of our current intellectual malaise. A new generation is rising, searching for answers, desperate to understand the cosmic coherence they intuitively feel. Lied to by our own modern-day poets and lyricists, it is high time we return to the voices of sanity, the poets who took seriously and believed implicitly the first words of Scripture: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

This volume collects, in modern spelling, Orchestra (with both of its endings) and Nosce Teipsum (with both of its dedications), fifty-six of Davies’ metrical Psalms and sixteen shorter poems, with a short biography and Robert Fludd’s engraving of the Mundane Monochord, explained. Joe Carlson’s introduction sets Davies against the modern habit of saying that man and the world are “nothing but” matter.