‘Tubal Cain and the first plow’

    

I hope all of you read The Square magazine. The periodical’s social media of yesterday brings our attention to its September 2021 issue, particularly an article on Charles Mackay by W. Bro. Kenneth C. Jack. I leave it to you to read that, but for this edition of The Magpie Mason I share one of Mackay’s poems. “Tubal Cain” is found in volumes either of Mackay’s own work or in collections of various poets.

One such anthology from 1905 England, The Poets and the People, published by what was the Liberal Publication Department, an arm of that country’s National Liberal Federation, employs verse in documenting how the term liberalism once had meant belief in, and upholding of, liberty. It’s an amazing book, uniting Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, P.B. Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and Mackay, plus more than a dozen other voices raised for freedom, decency, democracy, and patriotism. (Its editor, the renowned Alfred Henry Miles, contributes his sonnet titled “Let There Be Light!” which inveighs against the darkness of ignorance and bigotry.)

But was Charles Mackay a Brother Freemason? That’s inconclusive. The headline of Bro. Jack’s article says yes, but near the bottom of the story he concedes that “a question mark should be appended” to the headline. There seems to be no easily obtainable proof of Mackay’s initiation or membership, which I think is too unusual for a well known man of letters.