Known Unknowns: Sir John Davies’ Nosce Teipsum in Conversation

Abstract

This essay examines Sir John Davies’ long poem Nosce Teipsum in dialogue with an unpublished contemporary critique by the otherwise unknown Robert Chambers, written in the same verse form. Whereas Davies conveys a thoroughgoing ambivalence about the possibility of self-knowledge, an ambivalence rather obscured by his confident and polished iambic pentameter, Chambers explicitly and repetitively rejects that possibility. But whenever Chambers tries to engage with the details of Davies’ theological tenets—that every soul was created directly and individually by God, that man was made in the image of God, and that the soul exists entirely in every part of the body—he arrives at inarticulate and even nonsensical rival formulas. In other words, Chambers’ poem seems unwittingly to demonstrate his own argument that spiritual self-knowledge is impossible. I read these two poems together as a sort of parable about the potential value to readers of accidental inarticulacy, alongside the deliberate counterfeit sort of inarticulacy that we have long prized. [A.O.R]