Thank you. Roger, that makes
sense - I hadn't thought of it as being in the figurative sense:
or not in that figurative sense. I suppose that, in a
way, the three verses of When Drake went down to the Horn,
are really an intro to section II of the poem, in a way that Hear
now the Song of the Dead should be regarded as an Intro to
the sixteen lines of Section I. But as it's printed in my copy of
DV, When Drake went down to the Horn follows on with but a
single line space after section I, very much as though it was a
part of Section I.
Thanks again,
Yours,
Alastair
On 11/12/2012 23:11, Roger Ayers wrote:
Dear Alastair,
I think that you might be taking Kipling a bit
too literally. The section on The Song of the Dead is not
about the sea itself, but about the English who were driven or
lured to discover the world and left their dead in the north,
south, east and west by the 'sand-drift, veldt-side and
fern-scrub', all very much on land.
I think that his reference to the birth of a
Lodge is in the sense that it was a Guild of those founders of
empire who had died and not directly in the sense of a
Freemason's Lodge.
Roger
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, December 11,
2012 5:51 PM
Subject: The Song of the
English (The Song of the Dead)
I am in the process of
annotating this poem, and would be grateful for any insights
which any member can offer, on one particular facet.
'The Song of the Dead' is a sub-set,
one might say, of 'The Song of the
English': and of itself is really four separate poems. The
third poem is the one which starts "When
Drake went down to the Horn / And England was crowned
thereby": the next couplet reads "'Twixt
seas unsailed and shores unhailed / Our
Lodge - our Lodge was born."
My query relates to
the use of "Our Lodge": I assume that the
reference is to Freemasonry (and we know that
Kipling was, since his days in Lahore, what one
might call an 'occasional Mason').
The craft of the mason is as old
as the hills, literally,
since it was in the stone from the hills that
the craft was born. But until the late middle
ages at least, the tradesmen who followed the
mason's craft, in forming their Guilds, or Lodges, were merely forming a
trade union. According to the invaluable
Wikipedia, the first admirssion of
non-practising masons to a lodge
was in 1634. And the establishment of a Grand Lodge seems to date from
the beginning of the 18th century, and to have marked the
beginning of modern Freemasonry. (In
writing all this, I am acutely conscious
that as a non-Mason, I am wholly ignorant,
and if any reader of this is a Mason, then
please correct me.)
My question, then, is 'Why did Kipling
introduce a mention of Freemasonry into that part of the poem which
pre-dates modern freemasonry, and why
does he associate it with the sea?' If
there's one part of the globe (and it's
the greater part, by a long way) where the craft of masonry is
unused, it's the sea.
Any comments will be
most gratefully received.
Alastair Wilson
PS. Using the equally
invaluable Google, it is
apparent that a number of Masons
have delivered papers on Kipling
and Freemasonry,
but isn't there a book, or
perhaps it's an article in the
Journal, which touches
on the subject?
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