Study guide
Davideis
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Overview
- Published
- 1656, as the last section of Cowley's folio Poems (London: Humphrey Moseley), after the Miscellanies, The Mistress and the Pindarique Odes
- Full title
- Davideis, A Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David
- Genre
- Biblical (sacred) epic, left unfinished
- Metre
- Rhymed heroic couplets, varied by alexandrines, half-lines, occasional fourteeners and two lyric songs in irregular stanzas
- Length
- Four books of a planned twelve; about 3,900 lines in this edition
- Source
- 1 Samuel 8–22, with inset histories reaching from the Creation to the birth of Christ
- Setting
- Saul's court at Gibeah, the prophets' college at Ramah (Naioth), Nob, Gath, the cave of Adullam and the court of the King of Moab; also Hell and Heaven
- Narrators
- The poet; Joab (most of Book III) and David (most of Book IV) tell the earlier story to the King of Moab
- Apparatus
- Cowley's own learned notes to each book, on Hebrew antiquities, natural philosophy, poetics and his metrical choices
- Famous for
- The Preface's call for a Christian, scriptural poetry; the infernal scene of Book I; the hymn to friendship in Book II; its place between Du Bartas and Paradise Lost
Context
Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) was the most celebrated English poet of the mid-seventeenth century. Born in London, the posthumous son of a stationer, he was a schoolboy at Westminster when his first volume, Poetical Blossomes, appeared in 1633. He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1637 and became a fellow, writing plays and verse in the university's royalist circle. Ejected by Parliament in 1644, he moved to the king's headquarters at Oxford and then followed Queen Henrietta Maria into exile in Paris, where for about ten years he served the royal family as a secretary, ciphering and deciphering the queen's correspondence with Charles I and other royalists (Nethercot 1931) (Lindsay 2004).
In 1654 or early 1655 Cowley returned to England, apparently on some royalist errand; he was arrested in London in April 1655 and released only on a heavy bail. In 1656 he published his Poems, a handsome folio containing the Miscellanies, the love sequence The Mistress, the Pindarique Odes (his free imitations of Pindar, which launched a fashion for 'Pindarics') and, last of all, the four books of Davideis, each followed by his learned notes. Its Preface, one of the great critical documents of the period, announced that the poet was laying aside love poetry and argued that the proper matter of a modern poet was Scripture rather than the fables of the pagan gods. The standard modern text is still Waller's edition; a scholarly collected edition is in progress (Sprat 1668) (Trotter 1979) (Cowley 1905) (Cowley 1989).
The Preface also explains the poem's design and its abandonment. Cowley had meant to write twelve books, a number chosen, he explains, on the pattern of Virgil rather than for the twelve tribes of Israel, ending with David's elegy on Saul and Jonathan; he had reached only four, and in his present circumstances he did not expect to finish. His biographer Thomas Sprat says that the greater part of the poem was written while Cowley was still at Cambridge, so that the Davideis may belong largely to the years before the war, revised and annotated in exile; how much was written when remains a matter of inference (Sprat 1668) (Nethercot 1931).
The poem belongs to a European debate about whether Christian truth could replace pagan myth in heroic poetry. Tasso had defended a Christian epic in Italy; Du Bartas's Divine Weeks, known in Sylvester's translation, had made the Creation into popular English verse; Davenant's Gondibert (1651), with its Preface and Hobbes's Answer, had argued for a reasonable, probable heroic poem. Cowley's answer is a narrative drawn from Scripture, told with Virgilian structure (an opening in mid-story, inset narration, prophecy, epic similes, councils of Heaven and Hell) and glossed with the full apparatus of humanist and Hebraic learning (Lewalski 1966) (Du Bartas 1979) (Davenant 1971).
The Davideis was admired and imitated for half a century. Dryden, who learned much from Cowley's couplets and alexandrines, later remarked how far his reputation had fallen; Johnson's 'Life of Cowley' (1779), which gave currency to the label 'metaphysical poets', judged the poem harshly. Yet it remains the most ambitious English attempt at a scriptural epic before Paradise Lost, and the most revealing record of how a royalist poet imagined kingship, tyranny and loyal friendship in the years of defeat (Johnson 2006) (Hinman 1960).
Plot overview
Saul, king of Israel, has for a moment been reconciled with David, the young hero who killed Goliath and married the king's daughter Michal. In Hell, Lucifer rages that a shepherd boy should thwart him, and Envy volunteers to destroy the peace. Disguised as Saul's ancestor Benjamin, she visits the sleeping king and plants a serpent in his breast. God sends an angel to warn David. Summoned to soothe Saul's madness with his harp, David sings a version of Psalm 114, but Saul hurls his spear at him; Michal lets David down from a window and deceives the murderers with a disguised image in his bed. David takes refuge with Samuel's college of prophets at Ramah, where Saul's messengers, and at last Saul himself, are overcome by the spirit of prophecy.
In Book II David turns to his friend Jonathan, Saul's son. At the feast of the new moon Saul notices David's absence, rages at Jonathan and throws his spear at him too; the friends part with oaths of lasting love. As David sleeps in the open, an angel shapes for him a prophetic dream of his own reign and of the kings of Judah who will follow him, from Solomon to the destruction of Jerusalem, ending with the Annunciation and the birth of Christ. Gabriel then appears and confirms the vision.
In Book III David goes to the priest at Nob, who gives him Goliath's sword, and then to Gath, where he escapes only by feigning madness. Gathering a band of kinsmen and warriors in the cave of Adullam, he leads his parents to safety at the court of the King of Moab. At a feast Joab tells the king David's story: his ancestry, his music, the killing of Goliath, the friendship of Jonathan, the contrasting daughters of Saul, Merab and Michal, the price of a hundred Philistine foreskins and the wedding.
In Book IV, riding with the King of Moab to the hunt, David himself tells the earlier history of Israel: the age of the judges, the people's demand for a king and Samuel's warning against it, the lot that falls on Saul, Saul's victory over Nahash at Jabesh, his disobedience at Gilgal, and Jonathan's single-handed attack on the Philistine camp at Michmash, which ends with Saul's rash vow nearly costing his son his life. The poem breaks off as the hunters arrive at the chase.
Book by book
Book 1: Hell, Heaven and the Harp
Summary
Cowley sings 'the Man who Iudahs Scepter bore', the shepherd who became poet and king, and calls on Christ, born of David's line, to inspire him. His Muse, he says, is now a 'chaste Vestal': too long poetry has served pagan gods, and he will show that 'Truth is truest Poesie'. Saul's malice has relented and he renews his vows to David. The scene then descends beneath the earth to Hell, where Lucifer reigns 'Tyrant in his Chains'. Furious that a shepherd boy should cross him, he rebukes the fiends; Envy crawls forth, boasts of her past crimes from Cain to Korah, and promises to break the peace.
Envy flies to Saul's palace, takes the shape of Benjamin, father of his tribe, and works on the sleeping king's fear and pride, leaving one of her snakes in his bosom. Saul wakes and swears to kill David. In a contrasting description of Heaven, where 'an Eternal Now does always last', God sends an angel to warn David that he can go safely to the king. Called to cure Saul's fit with music, David sings an ode on the Exodus based on Psalm 114; the poet pauses to explain the power of music through the harmony of the created world.
The music calms Saul, but he casts his spear at David, and an angel turns it aside. Michal sees the guards approaching from the palace roof, lowers David through a window and deceives the soldiers with a statue's head laid in his bed. David flees to the college of prophets that Samuel has founded at Ramah, a plain and learned community whose library, teachers and sacred music are described at length. Saul's soldiers, and finally Saul himself, are seized by the spirit of prophecy there; the book ends, like Balaam's oracle, in blessing instead of curse.
Analysis
The invocation and its programme make Book I a manifesto as well as an opening. Cowley turns the classical epic proem into a Christian one, calling not on the Muses but on Christ, and claims for himself the role of an apostle converting the 'Muses-Lands'. The two halves of David's career, poet and king, are joined in the first lines, and the poem's royalism is present from the start: David is the rightful king persecuted by a tyrant, and Christ's 'humble Crown' of thorns stands behind every crown in the poem (Trotter 1979) (Hinman 1960).
The infernal scene is the passage most often compared with Paradise Lost. Cowley's Hell is a place of 'genuine Night' with no bound, and his Lucifer, proud in defeat and conscious of what he has lost ('Did I lose Heav'en for this?'), anticipates Milton's Satan, while Envy's boast of the war in Heaven, 'There was a Day!', recalls the tradition of the rebel angels. But Cowley's devils are emblematic rather than tragic: Envy, with serpent hair, whip and bowl of gall, is a figure from the moral allegory of Spenser and Ovid, and the scene's real target is Saul's soul, where envy becomes a political passion (Revard 1980) (Nethercot 1931).
The passage on music is the philosophical centre of the book. Creation is 'Gods Poem', a confusion brought to order by number, and man is 'all o're Harmonie'; music works on the soul by sympathy, as one string sounds when its twin is struck. Cowley's notes expand this Pythagorean and Platonic doctrine with learned references, and the theory justifies his own art, since a poet who orders words in measure imitates the divine maker. The college at Ramah, with its library and choir, is the institutional form of the same ideal: a community of learning and sacred song set against the disorder of Saul's court (Hinman 1960).
Too long the Muses-Lands have Heathen bin; Their Gods too long were Dev'ils, and Vertues Sin; But Thou, Eternal Word, hast call'ed forth Mee Th'Apostle, to convert that World to Thee; T'unbind the charms that in flight Fables lie, And teach that Truth is truest Poesie.
The poem's programme in brief, matching the argument of the 1656 Preface: classical myth is to be replaced by scriptural truth, and the poet becomes a missionary to the pagan territory of poetry.
Oh my ill-chang'ed condition! oh my fate! Did I lose Heav'en for this?
Lucifer's broken line is a deliberate half-verse; Cowley's notes defend such incomplete lines by Virgil's example. The lament for lost Heaven anticipates Milton's Satan.
Such was Gods Poem, this Worlds new Essay; So wild and rude in its first draught it lay; Th'ungovern'd parts no Correspondence knew, An artless war from thwarting Motions grew; Till they to Number and fixt rules were brought By the aeternal minds Poetick Thought.
Creation imagined as a poem brought to order by number: the cosmic harmony that explains David's music also justifies Cowley's own measured verse.
Book 2: Friendship and the Dream of Kings
Summary
At dawn Saul rises with his rage renewed, and David, seeing the storm coming, turns to Jonathan, Saul's son, who has loved him since he saw him at Dammin after the death of Goliath. The poet breaks into a long hymn to Love as the bond of the universe, distinguishing sacred love from the blind Cupid of the ancients and praising the friendship of David and Jonathan as purer than marriage. David tells Jonathan that Saul means to kill him; Jonathan at first refuses to believe it of his father, but agrees to test the king.
At the solemn feast of the new moon, which Cowley identifies with the seventh month's feast of trumpets, Saul goes in procession to sacrifice and then to a banquet in a hall hung with tapestries of Abraham's life, including the sacrifice of Isaac. Missing David, he accuses him of conspiracy; when Jonathan defends him, Saul insults him and hurls his spear. Jonathan warns David, and the friends part, swearing eternal love before God.
David falls asleep in a forest. An angel enters the region of Fancy in his mind and arranges its images into a prophetic vision: David's conquests, the taking of Jerusalem, the reign and temple of Solomon, the division of the kingdom, and the long succession of good and bad kings down to the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity, followed by the line that leads to Joseph, the Annunciation to Mary and the Nativity. David wakes, and Gabriel, clothed in a body made of cloud and rainbow, confirms that the vision is true and that from his seed will come the 'promis'd Shilo'.
Analysis
The friendship of David and Jonathan is the emotional heart of the Davideis, and Book II makes it a doctrine as well as a story. Love is the force that holds the world together, and the friendship of the two princes, free of 'the Sex', is its highest human form. For a royalist readership the theme had particular weight: loyalty between friends, maintained against a tyrant and at the cost of a kingdom, is offered as the virtue that survives the collapse of public order, and the friends' oaths echo the cult of loyal friendship among royalist writers in exile (Loxley 1997) (Miner 1971).
The dream of the future kings is modelled on Virgil's parade of Roman heroes in Aeneid 6 and on the visions of history in Spenser and Du Bartas. It turns the poem's small action into salvation history: David's persecution is the beginning of a line that leads to Christ. The rapid catalogue, compressing each reign into a few couplets, also shows Cowley's taste for the sententious line, and its sombre central section, the sins of the kings and the destruction of the Temple, reads with special force in a decade when the English monarchy had itself fallen (Lewalski 1966) (Trotter 1979).
The book is full of Cowley's learning. The feast of trumpets is given three alternative explanations, typological, historical and rabbinic, before the poet concludes that God's will makes 'nice knowledge' unnecessary; the region of Fancy in the brain is described with the faculty psychology of the schools; Gabriel's assumed body raises the scholastic question of how angels appear. Johnson singled out Gabriel's costume as an example of misplaced ingenuity, and the passage remains a test case for whether Cowley's wit serves or distracts from the heroic (Johnson 2006).
He saw all this, and as he saw, he Lov'ed. What art thou, Love, thou great mysterious thing? From what hid stock does thy strange Nature spring? 'Tis thou that mov'est the world through every part
Jonathan's love at first sight opens into a philosophical hymn: the friendship of the two princes is an instance of the love that moves the cosmos.
Isra'els bright Scepter far less glory brings; There have been fewer Friends on earth then Kings.
A characteristic epigrammatic close. Jonathan, heir to the throne, gains more glory by his friendship than he could by the crown he will lose to David.
They doubt the Lords, mistrust the Peoples hate, Till Blood become a Principle of State. Secur'd nor by their Guards, nor by their Right, But still they Fear ev'en more then they Affright.
David's analysis of tyranny. The political vocabulary ('Principle of State') brings the language of seventeenth-century statecraft into the biblical story.
Book 3: Exile, Goliath and Michal
Summary
David goes to Nob, where the old priest feeds him with the holy bread and gives him Goliath's sword, remembering the day of the combat. He flees to Gath, is recognised and seized, and escapes by feigning madness. In a great cave near Adullam he is joined by his kindred and a band of warriors, whom the poet catalogues: Joab, Abishai, the swift Asahel, Benaiah, the boy Ira, Eleazar the son of Dodo, and others. Like Aeneas carrying Anchises out of Troy, David takes his parents to safety, and the poet describes the kingdom of Moab and its wise old king, who welcomes the exiles out of hatred for Saul and respect for virtue, recalling that Ruth, David's ancestress, was a Moabite.
In a feasting hall decorated with pictures of Lot, Abraham and the destruction of Sodom, including a striking description of Lot's wife turning to stone, the court poet Melchor sings of natural philosophy. Then the king asks Joab to tell David's story. Joab recounts David's ancestry, his early music for the troubled Saul, and the battle at Dammin: Goliath's shield and armour, his blasphemous challenge, David's refusal of Saul's armour, the stone and the giant's fall, and the women's songs that first awakened Saul's envy.
Joab then describes Jonathan's love for David and the two daughters of Saul: the proud and stately Merab, promised to David but married to the rich Adriel, and the gentle Michal, who loves him. David's song under her window, 'Awake, awake my Lyre', wins her heart. Saul, hoping David will be killed, demands a hundred Philistine foreskins as a dowry; David brings two hundred, and the wedding is celebrated with a procession of virgins and youths. Within a week Saul repents the match, and Joab ends by explaining that it is this persecution that has brought them to Moab.
Analysis
Book III gives the poem its Virgilian structure. Like Aeneas at Carthage, the exiled hero is received at a foreign court, and his past is told at a feast; Cowley assigns the narration to Joab, and the Aeneas simile makes the model explicit. The device lets Cowley begin in the middle of the story while still including the famous episode of Goliath, and it places David's history before a pagan but virtuous king, whose admiration for Israel's God and hero is part of the poem's argument about the universality of truth (Taaffe 1972) (Trotter 1979).
The Goliath episode shows Cowley's heroic manner at its best and at its most ingenious. The giant's shield depicts the war of gods and giants, an emblem of pagan presumption; David's speech turns the contest into a theological one ('He's stronger far then I, my God then His'); the similes of the tiger and the thunder-struck oak are traditional, while the stone that strikes 'with joyful noise' shows his habit of witty animation. The tapestry and picture descriptions, which in Book II and Book III retell Genesis, are examples of ekphrasis in the tradition of Virgil's temple of Juno and Spenser's tapestries (Hinman 1960).
The portraits of Merab and Michal are an exercise in balanced antithesis, close to the manner of The Mistress, and David's song, in irregular lyric stanzas, connects the epic with Cowley's love poetry and the Pindaric odes. The book's frankness about the dowry and its handling of courtship have troubled readers who expect a uniform sacred tone, but the mixture is deliberate: the Preface had argued that all the passions and ornaments of poetry could be employed in a sacred subject without the falsehood of pagan fable (Trotter 1979) (Nethercot 1931).
Go pious Prince, in peace, in triumph goe; Enjoy the Conquest of thine Overthrowe; To have sav'd thy Troy would far less glorious be; By this thou Overcom'est their Victorie.
The apostrophe to Aeneas carrying Anchises compares David's care for his parents with the founding act of Virgil's 'pious' hero, setting the sacred epic in direct rivalry with the Aeneid.
Count this, and then, Sir, mine th'advantage is; He's stronger far then I, my God then His.
David's reply to Saul's doubts turns the duel into a contest between gods; the antithesis is typical of Cowley's pointed couplets.
Awake, awake my Lyre, And tell thy silent Masters humble tale, In sounds that may prevaile; Sounds that gentle thoughts inspire,
The opening of David's serenade to Michal, a lyric in varied line lengths set into the couplets. It shows the epic absorbing the lyric modes of Cowley's other books.
Book 4: The History of Israel
Summary
Next morning the King of Moab, after praying to the sun and to Baal-Peor, rides out to hunt with David in his chariot and asks him to tell the history of Saul's family and how it came to the throne. David recounts the conquest under Joshua and the disorder of the age of the judges: the oppression of the poor, the outrage at Gibeah and the civil war it caused, idolatry, the fall of Eli's house and the capture of the Ark. Samuel restores order, but when his sons prove corrupt and the Ammonites threaten, the tribes demand a king.
Their spokesman Nacol makes an eloquent petition; Samuel answers with a warning that a king will be a tyrant who takes their sons, daughters and goods. The King of Moab interrupts to defend monarchy. God answers Samuel's prayer, in lines of fourteen syllables, with anger at the people's ingratitude, and the lot falls on Saul, son of Kish, a tall, brave and modest man who went looking for his father's lost asses and found a crown. Saul relieves Jabesh-Gilead from Nahash the Ammonite, who has demanded the right eyes of its citizens; Jonathan kills Nahash in single combat, and Samuel, resigning his office, warns king and people that both exist for God.
Saul's reign begins to decline when, with the Philistines massed at Michmash and his army melting away, he offers sacrifice himself instead of waiting for Samuel, and Samuel foretells the loss of his dynasty. Jonathan and his squire Abdon climb the rocks to the Philistine outpost and rout the enemy army, aided by angels and storm. Faint with hunger, Jonathan eats wild honey, unaware of Saul's vow that anyone who ate before evening should die. Saul is ready to execute his son, but the people refuse to let their saviour be sacrificed. David mentions the later wars still to tell, and the hunters arrive at the chase, where the poem ends.
Analysis
Book IV is the most explicitly political part of the Davideis. The history of the judges shows the dangers of a state without settled authority, while Samuel's speech against kings is one of the strongest anti-monarchical texts in the Bible, much quoted by republicans in the 1640s and 1650s. Cowley lets Samuel make the case in full ('though a King / Be the mild Name, a Tyrant is the Thing') and then lets the King of Moab reply that laws can guide but not rule; Samuel's final charge, that king and people were made for each other and both for God, sets out a limited, religious monarchy. Critics have read these debates as Cowley's reflection on the English quarrel over kingship (Loxley 1997) (Allsopp 2020).
The figure of Saul is drawn with care. His portrait at his election is wholly admiring, and David the narrator, speaking of his persecutor, insists on his natural greatness before 'Power and violent Fortune' deform it. The tragedy of the ruler who is corrupted by power, and who drives away his best servants through envy, is the poem's central political idea, and it gives the Davideis a moral seriousness that its ornaments sometimes obscure (Hinman 1960) (Trotter 1979).
Jonathan's exploit at Michmash is the poem's fullest battle-narrative, and his near-sacrifice for breaking a vow he never heard is its most tragic episode: the victor of the day must become 'Dying, an Hecatombe'. The parallel with Jephthah's daughter, and with the human sacrifices of pagan epic, is close, but the people's 'better publick Vow' saves him. Ending on this episode, Cowley leaves his unfinished epic with an image of a just people restraining a rash king, a conclusion that was no doubt accidental but has struck many readers as apt (Taaffe 1972).
Cheat not your selves with words: for though a King Be the mild Name, a Tyrant is the Thing. Let his power loose, and you shall quickly see How wild a thing unbounded Man will bee.
Samuel's warning (after 1 Samuel 8) in Cowley's epigrammatic style; in the 1650s it would have recalled the republican use of this chapter against monarchy.
This stubborn land sins still, nor is it Thee, but Us (Who have been so long their King) they seek to cast off thus
God's voice is marked by fourteen-syllable lines, a deliberate metrical change to set the divine speech apart from the human couplets.
Obey him gladly, and let him too know You were not made for Him, but he for You, And both for God.
Samuel's charge at Saul's confirmation states the poem's ideal of monarchy, limited by its duty to the people and to God. The half-line close is another of Cowley's Virgilian broken verses.
Characters
David and his friends
- David
- The son of Jesse, shepherd, harpist, poet and anointed future king. Cowley presents him as the ideal Christian hero: beautiful, brave and modest, a musician whose art can calm madness, and a loyal servant who never strikes back at the king who persecutes him. His virtues of patience and trust in God are those of a type of Christ, and his suffering under Saul made him an obvious figure for exiled royalists.
- Jonathan
- Saul's eldest son and David's sworn friend. In Cowley he is the pattern of princely virtue, learned, generous and brave, who gives up his claim to the throne out of love for David. His single-handed attack at Michmash in Book IV is the poem's greatest feat of arms, and his near-death under his father's vow its most tragic moment.
- Michal
- Saul's younger daughter and David's wife. Gentle, fair-haired and modest, she is contrasted with her proud sister Merab. In Book I she saves David by lowering him from a window and deceiving the soldiers with a statue in his bed; in Book III Joab tells the story of her courtship.
- Joab
- David's nephew and later his general, 'wise and valiant', though the poet hints at a 'cunning Sin' among his virtues. He narrates most of Book III to the King of Moab.
- Abishai, Asahel, Benaiah and the band at Adullam
- The warriors who join David in the cave of Adullam, catalogued in Book III in the manner of an epic catalogue: Abishai who killed three hundred at once, Asahel the swift runner whose early death the poet foresees, Benaiah who killed an Egyptian giant and a lion in a pit, the boy Ira, the son of Dodo, and others.
- Abdon
- Jonathan's squire and devoted friend, who climbs with him to the Philistine outpost at Michmash. Scripture leaves Jonathan's armour-bearer unnamed; Cowley gives him a name and a speech of loyal courage.
Saul's court
- Saul
- The first king of Israel, chosen by lot, magnificent in body and once modest and brave, but corrupted by power and consumed by envy of David. Cowley shows him both as a tyrant, possessed by Envy's serpent and quick to hurl his spear, and as a tragic figure who briefly prophesies at Ramah and whose fall at Gilboa is repeatedly foretold.
- Merab
- Saul's elder daughter, stately, dark-haired and proud, who scorns David as a shepherd of no great house and marries the rich Adriel instead.
- Adriel
- The wealthy suitor who patiently endures Merab's scorn and finally marries her; he sits among the princes at Saul's feast.
- Abner
- Saul's kinsman and commander, who leads one of the three divisions at Jabesh and takes his place at the royal table.
- Samuel
- Prophet and last judge of Israel, founder of the college of prophets at Ramah. He warns the people against monarchy, anoints Saul, and later announces that his dynasty will be cut off. He stands for prophetic and priestly authority above the king.
Heaven and Hell
- Lucifer
- The fallen archangel, 'Proud, midst his Woes, and Tyrant in his Chains', once 'General of a guilded Host'. His rage at the shepherd boy sets the infernal plot in motion.
- Envy
- The most terrible of the fiends, a personification with serpent hair, a whip and a bowl of gall, who devours herself. Disguised as Benjamin she poisons Saul's mind; she is the poem's chief agent of evil and the source of Saul's tyranny.
- God
- Enthroned beyond time in an 'Eternal Now', God foresees Saul's end and protects David. He speaks directly in Book I and, in fourteeners, in Book IV.
- Gabriel
- The archangel who clothes himself in a body made from cloud, meteor and rainbow to confirm David's prophetic dream in Book II. An unnamed angel brings God's warning in Book I and turns aside Saul's spear.
Others
- The King of Moab
- A wise, temperate and hospitable old king, a worshipper of Baal but 'almost too good for Hell', who shelters David's parents and listens to the narratives of Books III and IV. He interrupts Samuel's story to defend monarchy.
- Goliath
- The Philistine giant of Gath, clad in brass and carrying a shield that depicts the war of the gods and giants, whose blasphemous challenge and death are told by Joab in Book III.
- Nahash
- The Ammonite king who besieges Jabesh and demands the right eyes of its citizens; Cowley has him killed by Jonathan in single combat.
- Melchor
- The court poet of Moab, who sings of natural philosophy at the feast in Book III; a heathen who 'sometimes mist the Cause, but sought it Well'.
Themes
Sacred truth against pagan fable
The Davideis is a poem with a programme. Both the Preface and the invocation argue that poetry has served false gods long enough and that Scripture offers subjects nobler than the fables of Greece and Rome. Cowley's aim is not to abandon classical form but to fill it with true matter: the Virgilian epic, with its councils, prophecies and similes, is transferred to biblical history.
The poem is therefore full of polemical comparisons. The Moabite poet who 'sought it Well' but missed the cause, the giant's shield with its pagan battle of gods and giants, the 'fab'ulous Ancients' who made Love blind: each sets pagan learning beside the truth that corrects it. Cowley's position is humanist rather than puritan: pagan wisdom is incomplete rather than worthless.
Tyranny and lawful kingship
Saul is a lawful king who becomes a tyrant, and David is the anointed successor who refuses to rebel. This double structure allowed Cowley to explore the nature of kingship without simple partisanship. Tyranny is the work of envy and fear, which make 'Blood ... a Principle of State'; legitimate monarchy is limited by its duty to God and the people.
Book IV places the biblical debate over kingship at the centre of the poem, giving voice to Samuel's warning and the King of Moab's defence. Read in the 1650s, when England had abolished monarchy and then accepted a Protector, these debates invited reflection on the English crisis, though Cowley avoids direct allegory.
Friendship
The love of David and Jonathan is celebrated as the purest of human bonds, stronger than family ties, ambition or marriage. It reflects the Renaissance cult of friendship inherited from Cicero and Montaigne and the royalist ideal of loyalty in adversity. Jonathan's sacrifice of his claim to the throne makes friendship a political as well as a private virtue.
Friendship is also given a cosmic basis. Love, in the hymn of Book II, is the force that holds the universe together, and the harmony of friends mirrors the harmony of creation.
Harmony, music and number
Music is the poem's central image of order. David's harp can calm Saul's madness because the human soul is a harmony and responds to harmony by sympathy. The world itself is 'Gods Poem', ordered by number, and the poet who writes in measure imitates the divine creator.
The college at Ramah, where music, astronomy, mathematics and sacred song are taught together, represents a society ordered by the same principles. Against it stand Hell's confusion and the disorder of Saul's mind.
Envy and the passions
Envy is the poem's chief evil, personified in Hell and active in Saul's heart. Cowley treats it as a political passion: a ruler who envies his best servants destroys the safety of his own state. The poem's interest in the psychology of passion, in Saul's alternation of rage, remorse and fear, connects it with the moral philosophy of the period.
Providence and history
David's sufferings are part of a providential plan stretching from Creation to the birth of Christ. The prophetic dream of Book II and the history of Book IV place the poem's action within salvation history, and the repeated foreshadowing of Saul's death at Gilboa reminds the reader that the persecutor's triumph is temporary. For a defeated royalist, the theme of patience under providence had an obvious personal meaning.
Motifs
Epigrammatic couplets
Cowley constantly closes passages with balanced, antithetical lines ('He's stronger far then I, my God then His'). These sententious couplets, which anticipate Dryden and Pope, give the poem much of its energy and some of its monotony.
Metrical variation
Alexandrines, half-lines, fourteeners and inset lyric stanzas break the couplet pattern, usually to imitate the sense: the flood that 'overruns the neighboring fields', Lucifer's broken lament, the speech of God. Cowley's notes explain and defend these choices.
Ekphrasis
Tapestries in Saul's hall, pictures in the Moabite palace and Goliath's shield describe scenes from Genesis and pagan myth, retelling biblical history within the poem and inviting comparison with Homer's and Virgil's shields and temples.
Spears and swords
Saul's spear, thrown at David and later at Jonathan, is the recurrent sign of his tyranny; Goliath's sword, returned to David at Nob, marks the providential transfer of strength from the giant to the shepherd.
Prophecy and dreams
Angelic messages, the dream of the kings, Samuel's warnings and the repeated forecasts of Gilboa connect the poem's episodes to their future fulfilment.
Symbols
David's harp
The harp stands for poetry, harmony and healing. It calms Saul, wins Michal and joins the choir at Ramah; it also represents Cowley's own art, which he dedicates to sacred subjects.
Envy's serpent
The snake that Envy leaves in Saul's bosom as her 'Vice-Roy' is a figure of the passion that rules the king from within, recalling the serpent of Eden and the snakes of the classical Furies.
Goliath's shield
Its picture of the giants' war against the gods is an emblem of pagan pride; Goliath believes the story, and like the giants he is struck down from heaven.
The honey at Michmash
The wild honey that restores Jonathan but brings him under the curse is a 'bitter-sweet' emblem of the danger that waits on human glory, and an echo of the forbidden fruit of Eden that Samuel's speech to Saul has just invoked.
Critical debates
The first English biblical epic?
The Davideis is often called the first English biblical epic, but the claim needs qualifying. Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas had given English readers a long scriptural poem, and there were shorter biblical narratives in English, such as Drayton's David and Goliah (1630) and the paraphrases of Quarles. What distinguishes Cowley's poem is its deliberate use of the full classical epic form, in twelve planned books on the Virgilian model, with an action beginning in the middle, inset narration and supernatural machinery.
Scholars of the genre place it in a European tradition of biblical epic, from the Latin poems of late antiquity and the Christiad of Vida to the French and Italian hexameral and heroic poems, and see in it the clearest English statement of the theory that Scripture can supply the matter of a true heroic poem (Lewalski 1966) (Du Bartas 1979) (Taaffe 1972).
Cowley and Milton
The resemblances between the Davideis and Paradise Lost are many: an unbounded Hell, a proud and grieving Lucifer, a council of fiends, a Heaven beyond time, an epic built on Scripture and announced as superior to classical fable. Milton certainly knew Cowley's poetry; his widow is reported to have said that he ranked Cowley with Spenser and Shakespeare among English poets.
Whether Milton borrowed specific details from the Davideis is debated. Many of the shared features belong to a common tradition of the war in Heaven and the infernal council, going back to Vida, Tasso and the hexameral poets, and Milton's Satan is a far more complex figure than Cowley's emblematic devils. Most critics now treat the Davideis as an important part of the context of Paradise Lost rather than a direct source (Revard 1980) (Nethercot 1931) (Hinman 1960).
The Preface and royalist politics in exile
The 1656 Preface, written after Cowley's arrest, contains a notorious passage implying that royalists should accept the verdict of providence and lay aside the cause; it was dropped from later editions, and some royalists regarded it as a betrayal. Critics disagree about how to read it: as a sincere change of heart, as a prudent price of freedom, or as a cover for continuing royalist loyalties.
The same questions have been put to the poems. Revard reads the Pindarique Odes as full of covert royalist allusion; Loxley places Cowley's verse within the poetics of royalist defeat; Trotter emphasises his intellectual seriousness and the poem's ideal of order; Allsopp argues that the 1656 Poems should be read as an attempt to fashion a poetic identity under the Protectorate rather than as coded royalism. The Davideis, with its persecuted king-to-be and its debates on monarchy, is central to all these readings, and Smith places it among the period's experiments in heroic poetry (Revard 1993) (Loxley 1997) (Trotter 1979) (Allsopp 2020) (Smith 1994).
Why was it left unfinished?
Cowley says in the Preface that he had neither the leisure nor the peace of mind to complete twelve books and did not expect to return to the work. Biographers have connected the abandonment with the circumstances of exile and imprisonment, with his turning to medicine and natural philosophy, and with a waning of his faith in the heroic project itself.
Some critics argue that the poem's structure was already troubled: the plan to end with the death of Saul would have made the poem a history of persecution rather than of triumph, and the narrative was weighed down by inset histories. Others see the four books as a coherent fragment whose Virgilian design is clear enough to be judged (Nethercot 1931) (Taaffe 1972) (Trotter 1979).
Wit and the heroic
Cowley's style mixes the elevated manner of epic with the ingenious comparisons of the 'metaphysical' lyric. Gabriel's costume of clouds and rainbows, the stone that strikes 'with joyful noise', and the many antitheses can delight or irritate. Dryden, who admired Cowley in his youth and learned from his alexandrines, later said that his reputation had sunk because he could never forgive any conceit that came his way.
Modern critics have tried to understand this mixture historically: Hinman relates it to Cowley's interest in the new philosophy and its vision of an ordered world, Miner to the Cavalier taste for social wit, and Trotter to a deliberate rhetoric of argument. Whether wit undermines the heroic or is an essential part of Cowley's conception of a learned epic remains the central critical question about the poem (Dryden 1962) (Hinman 1960) (Miner 1971) (Trotter 1979).
Johnson's verdict
In his 'Life of Cowley' (1779) Johnson described the 'metaphysical poets' as writers who yoked heterogeneous ideas by violence together, and he treated Cowley as the last and greatest of them. On the Davideis he was severe: sacred history, he thought, was unsuitable for poetic fiction, because invented additions to Scripture either offend or fail to interest; and he found the poem's descriptions extravagant and its narrative cold.
Johnson's essay shaped Cowley's reputation for two centuries, and much modern criticism has been an argument with it. Some scholars accept his judgement of the poem's failures but reject his assumptions about sacred poetry; others argue that he misunderstood Cowley's intellectual aims and the seventeenth-century taste for learned ornament (Johnson 2006) (Hinman 1960) (Taaffe 1972).
The notes and humanist learning
Cowley's notes, longer in places than the books they gloss, discuss Hebrew customs and chronology, Jewish and Christian commentators, Josephus, classical poets and natural philosophy, and explain the poem's metrical experiments. They make the Davideis a learned edition of itself and show how seriously Cowley took the scholarly basis of a sacred epic.
Readers have disagreed about their function. To some they are a pedantic distraction; to others they are an essential part of the poem's argument that true poetry and true learning coincide, and a valuable record of the Hebraic scholarship of the period. They also show Cowley defending his own art, anticipating objections to his half-lines and alexandrines (Hinman 1960) (Trotter 1979) (Sprat 1668).
Key passages
I Sing the Man who Iudahs Scepter bore In that right hand which held the Crook before; Who from best Poet, best of Kings did grow; The two chief Gifts Heav'n could on Man bestow.
The proem adapts Virgil's 'arma virumque cano' to a biblical hero. David is shepherd, poet and king at once, and the gifts of poetry and kingship are presented as the highest that God gives to man.
T'unbind the charms that in flight Fables lie, And teach that Truth is truest Poesie.
The most famous couplet in the poem, summarising the Preface's argument that Scripture should replace pagan myth as the matter of poetry.
Then scorns he such weak stops to his free source, And overruns the neighboring fields with violent course.
The simile of the dammed stream ends with an alexandrine that itself 'overruns' the couplet. Cowley's note explains that the long line is meant to paint the sense in the number, an early English defence of expressive metre.
Here Lucifer, the mighty Captive, reigns, Proud, midst his Woes, and Tyrant in his Chains.
The fallen angel is defined by antithesis: captive and king, suffering and proud. The paradox anticipates Milton's Satan, though Cowley's Lucifer is given far less inner life.
Nothing is there To come, and nothing Past, But an Eternal Now does always last.
Heaven as the timeless 'Eternal Now' of scholastic theology (the nunc stans of Boethius and Aquinas), contrasted with the endless darkness of Hell.
In this Great World so much of it we see; The Lesser, Man, is all o're Harmonie.
The doctrine of macrocosm and microcosm explains the healing power of David's music: the harmony of the world finds an echo in the harmony of the human soul.
Isra'els bright Scepter far less glory brings; There have been fewer Friends on earth then Kings.
Jonathan's friendship, at the cost of his own kingdom, is valued above royalty itself; the epigram expresses the poem's cult of loyal friendship.
Behinde his Wife stood ever fixt alone; No more a Woman, not yet quite a Stone.
From the ekphrasis of Lot's wife in the Moabite palace: the moment of transformation, caught between two states, shows Cowley's Ovidian pleasure in metamorphosis.
Thy Pride's my Spear, thy Blasphemies my Sword; My Shield, thy Maker, Fool; the mighty Lord Of Thee and Battels; who hath sent forth me Unarm'ed thus, not to Fight, but Conquer Thee.
David's reply to the giant converts the weapons of war into moral and religious terms, a characteristic Cowleian turn that makes the duel a contest of faith against pride.
Cheat not your selves with words: for though a King Be the mild Name, a Tyrant is the Thing.
The prophet's warning against monarchy, given its full force in a royalist poem. Its presence shows Cowley's willingness to stage the political debate of his own day within biblical history.
Questions for study
How does the invocation of Book I adapt the conventions of classical epic to a Christian subject?
Compare it with the openings of the Aeneid and Paradise Lost. Who is invoked instead of the Muse, and what does Cowley claim for his poetry?
What is the role of Envy in the poem, and why does Cowley make her, rather than Lucifer, the agent of Saul's persecution?
Consider the description of Envy, her disguise as Benjamin, and the way envy works in Saul's mind and in the political analysis of Book II.
Explain the theory of music and harmony set out in Book I. How does it relate to Cowley's view of poetry?
Look at 'Gods Poem', the idea of sympathy, and the college at Ramah. What does the theory imply about the poet's measured verse?
How does Cowley present the friendship of David and Jonathan, and why might it have mattered to a royalist reader in the 1650s?
Consider the hymn to Love in Book II, the contrast with marriage, and Jonathan's sacrifice of the throne.
What does the prophetic dream of Book II add to the poem? Compare it with Aeneid 6 or the last books of Paradise Lost.
Think about how it connects David's story to salvation history and to Christ, and about the tone of its account of the later kings.
Why does Cowley have Joab and David narrate the earlier story to the King of Moab?
Consider the model of Aeneas at Carthage, the advantages of beginning in mid-story, and the significance of a pagan audience.
How does Book IV treat the debate over monarchy? Is Cowley's position clear?
Compare Samuel's warning, the King of Moab's interruption, God's speech and Samuel's final charge to Saul and the people.
Discuss Cowley's metrical variations. What effects does he achieve with alexandrines, half-lines and fourteeners?
Look at the simile of the stream in Book I, Lucifer's broken line, and the speech of God in Book IV, and consider how the notes defend them.
Is Johnson right that sacred history is unsuitable for epic fiction?
Consider what Cowley adds to Scripture (Envy, the angels, the speeches, Abdon) and whether these additions strengthen or weaken the poem. Compare Milton.
What does the Davideis share with Paradise Lost, and how does it differ?
Compare Hell and its ruler, Heaven, the use of Scripture, the role of the narrator, and the treatment of kingship and obedience.
Further reading
- Allsopp, Niall. Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
- Cowley, Abraham. Poems: Miscellanies, The Mistress, Pindarique Odes, Davideis, Verses Written on Several Occasions. Ed. A. R. Waller. Cambridge English Classics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905.
- Cowley, Abraham. The Collected Works of Abraham Cowley. Ed. Thomas O. Calhoun, Laurence Heyworth et al. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989– (in progress).
- Davenant, Sir William. Sir William Davenant's Gondibert. Ed. David F. Gladish. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
- Dryden, John. Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays. Ed. George Watson. 2 vols. London: Dent, 1962.
- Du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste. The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur du Bartas. Trans. Josuah Sylvester. Ed. Susan Snyder. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.
- Hinman, Robert B. Abraham Cowley's World of Order. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960.
- Johnson, Samuel. The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on Their Works. Ed. Roger Lonsdale. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006.
- Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Milton's Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained. Providence: Brown University Press; London: Methuen, 1966.
- Lindsay, Alexander. 'Cowley, Abraham (1618–1667).' Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Loxley, James. Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997.
- Miner, Earl. The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
- Nethercot, Arthur H. Abraham Cowley: The Muse's Hannibal. London: Oxford University Press, 1931.
- Revard, Stella P. The War in Heaven: Paradise Lost and the Tradition of Satan's Rebellion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.
- Revard, Stella P. 'Cowley's Pindarique Odes and the Politics of the Inter-regnum.' Criticism 35.3 (1993): 391–418.
- Smith, Nigel. Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
- Sprat, Thomas. 'An Account of the Life and Writings of Mr Abraham Cowley.' In The Works of Mr Abraham Cowley. London: Henry Herringman, 1668.
- Taaffe, James G. Abraham Cowley. Twayne's English Authors Series. New York: Twayne, 1972.
- Trotter, David. The Poetry of Abraham Cowley. London: Macmillan, 1979.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.