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?