Sir John Davies is due for a revival. He is an underrated poet not because he is neglected or forgotten, but because he is remembered for the wrong reasons and in the wrong context. He has been pressed into service as a continuous supplier and illustrator of background. As a project, the Enlightenment was essentially about a search for truth, for the real nature and meaning of things as people find them and themselves in relation to them. Although Orchestra is essentially a poem imagining the order of the physical cosmos in terms of musical harmony and the movement of dance, these very metaphors allow Davies to move seamlessly from cosmic to human affairs. The use of ‘lights’ to mean eyes survives today only in slang but once it carried with it the whole mysterious sense of our being in people's own measure a ‘little world’, a microcosm.