October 22, 2025 • 11 mins
From the September/October 2025 edition of The Scottish Rite Journal. Any accompanying photographs or citations for this article can be found in the corresponding print edition.
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Make sure to like and subscribe to the channel! Freemasons, make sure you shout out your Lodge, Valley, Chapter or Shrine below!
OES, Job's Daughter's, Rainbow, DeMolay? Drop us a comment too!
To learn how to find a lodge near you, visit www.beafreemason.com
To learn more about the Scottish Rite, visit www.scottishrite.org
Visit our YouTube Page: Youtube.com/ScottishRiteMasons
Join our Lost Media Archive for only $1.99 a month!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv-F13FNBaW-buecl7p8cJg/join
Visit our new stores:Bookstore: https://www.srbookstore.myshopify.com/
Merch Store: http://www.shopsrgifts.com/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Scottish Right Journal podcast and audio presentation
of the Scottish Right Journal, brought to you by the
Supreme Council of the Scottish Right Southern Jurisdiction Mother Supreme
Council of the World. This week's article is the Masonic
Traveler Reflections from the River in praise of the poet,
Mason and builder Alexander Pope, by Brother Jonathan R. Corbett,
(00:24):
Master Mason, and comes from the September October twenty twenty
five issue of the Scottish Right Journal. Happy the man
whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, contend
to breathe his native air in his own ground. Thus
wrote the great English Enlightenment poet and freemason Alexander Pope,
in the opening verse of his Ode to Solitude. These
(00:47):
lines are in a sense timeless and easily could be
quoted by any city dweller of the fast moving world
of today. They echo the poet's search for serenity, for
an escape from the spoil air of the city, its
matting crowds, the noise of towns of business, with its
clink and jingle of silver and gold, all set amid
the frequent passionate and violent outbursts of religious ellotry and
(01:09):
intolerance during the penultimate years of seventeenth century London. Far
from the glittering, climbing spires of Sir Christopher Wren's phoenix
like new metropolis of London, and ten miles still from
Hyde Park corner, it was to relative safety of Binfield
in Berkshire where Pope and his family retreated in seventeen hundred,
escaping the strict penal laws and force in the city.
(01:31):
Betwixt the waters and the wild of country life, the
pope household could find respite, and where the young lad
was able to discover his own elysium, blossoming and flourishing,
unburdened by the punitive disabilities of the age. Pope's love
for the countryside is exemplified in his poem Windsor Forest,
published in seventeen thirteen to great acclaim, wherein he describes
(01:52):
the Edenic landscape of hills and vales, woodlands and plains
of his new home. As we see here there interspersed
in lawns and opening glade, finn trees arise that shun
each other's shades. Here in full light, the Russet plains
extend there wrapped in cloud, the Bluish hills ascend, even
the wild heath displays her purple dyes amidst the desert,
(02:16):
fruitful fields arise. In seventeen sixteen, together with his parents,
Pope moved from Binfield to the village of Cheswick, near
enough to London to manage his literary and publishing affairs
and to be closer to his ever growing circle of
admirers and friends, such as John Gay, John Arbuthnot and
Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels, all of whom
(02:38):
would meet at the Scribblerus Club. The irishman Swift, the
Dean of Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, was to become
a close friend, inspiring and providing encouragement to his English counterpart.
The Poet's House in Twickenham would become Swift's home intermittently
while on leave from Ireland. It is quite possible that
both men would have attended Lodge together in London, as
(03:01):
the membership list for seventeen thirty indicates that both were
inscribed as members of the Goat at the foot of
the Haymarket in Covent Garden, the Masonic Temple was truly
one of the few venues existing at the time where
good men could meet on the level, leaving their religious
and political differences squarely at the door. When not collaborating
together at the villa in Twickenham, calling through papers of
(03:23):
sketches and ideas, they took diversionary rambles together in the
West Country and around Marble Hill near to Twickenham. Between
seventeen sixteen and seventeen nineteen, the Pope family resided at
a modest red brick terraced house in Chiswick, still standing today.
There Pope worked upon his translation of Homer's Iliad. Pope
(03:44):
became well known as a satirist in works such as
The Dunciad and The Rape of the Lock. He expressed
eloquently many of the ideas of the Enlightenment, ideals of
reason and tolerance in accord with Freemasonry in his philosophical
poem An Essay on Man. Even those who are unfamiliar
with Pope and his poetry likely have heard many of
the epigrams he penned. Pope springs eternal to err is human,
(04:09):
to forgive divine, A little learning is a dangerous thing,
and fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Pope's
literary achievements, success and mark upon the English language bear
witness to his genius and also to his herculean like
strength in overcoming his own severe personal health and physical challenges.
(04:29):
The young Alexander shrewdly invested his new found wealth and property,
and was able to move two years later with his
mother to his new tame's side abode in the rustic
village of Twickenham, which became a hub of friendship and
hospitality for decades, hence until the poet's demise in seventeen
forty four. Now as a country gentleman, he was able
to indulge his passions for experimental gardening and architecture, becoming
(04:53):
not just a speculative mason, but something of a builder himself.
Brother Alexander Savant, in the class forms of our Masonic
Five Order's tradition, lent his creative ken to the design
of his future home, his own retreat on the River.
Pope finally wrote to his Irish friend and portrait painter
Charles Jervis, it is here I have passed an entire
(05:14):
year of my life without any fixed abode in London,
and more than casting a transitory glance for a day
or two at most in a month on the pomps
of the town, sketched out times over, no doubt, in
his usual and inimitable way, then skillfully planned with two
leading architects of the time, fellow Catholics, James Gibbs and
(05:35):
William Kent. Pope's villa, modest and low in stature, was
quite the physical embodiment of this poet, artist and mason,
a monument in stone to the earthly form and unassuming
virtues of Pope himself. Given Pope's direct experience and knowledge
of the River Thames, it is unsurprising that this lively, flowing,
lustrous river should make a regular appearance in his poetry,
(05:59):
as we find reference in Windsor Forest and in his pastorals,
written at the age of sixteen. Here he invokes the
fair river to flow gently from its sacred spring in
the Cotswold Hills, while upon its banks he visions and
hears Sicilian muses in song. The graceful shores of the
Thames truly yield the brightest beauties, and the poet found
(06:19):
contentment shepherding his lambs by its flowing waters, seeking not
yonder ranges. His praise of the ancient river is further
expressed in these first four lines to his summer. The
second Pastoral or alexis a shepherd's boy. He seeks no
better name. Led forth his flocks along the Silver Team,
where sun dancing beams on the water played and verdant
(06:41):
alders formed a quivering shade. Pope's pride and joy was
his new villa, rising to four stories high, adorned with
portraits of his beloved friends, designed in Palladian fashion, and
backed by a riverside garden beckoning in splendor to all
those traveling on the river. He was later to acquire
lane and on the London Road side of his villa,
(07:02):
where he lived out his love of landscape gardening. Brother
Alexander was immensely proud of his achievement, and, writing seventeen
twenty to his friend Robert Digby, Pope declares, my building
rises high enough to attract the eye and curiosity of
the passenger from the river, where upon, beholding a mixture
of beauty and ruin, he inquires, what house is that?
(07:24):
Or what church is rising? Walking along the riverside on
this warm summer's day, enveloped by its blissfully balmy ambience,
dotted occasionally with fleecy clouds, my riparian stroll might well
have led to the villa. Yet the poet's house and
gardens are sadly no more, having been demolished, uprooted, and
redeveloped over the past two hundred years. However, his famous
(07:47):
uniconic labyrinthian grotto, with its formerly running springs, still exists today,
and hither I betook myself. Created with great ingenuity over
a period of twenty years, and universally celebrated thereafter, this
veritable chamber of reflections to use Masonic parlance, remains an
ever enchanting attraction, a physical relic of his former home.
(08:10):
My crossing over into the central chamber of the grotto
marked the start of a journey through time, walking in
Pope's footsteps. Entering this unique labyrinth of sparkling flints, gems,
mirrors and other worldliness, all resembling the tunnels of a
diamond mine. Suddenly a spacious, splendidly spangled side chamber appeared
from the south, revealing the statue of Roman Matrone. Then
(08:34):
in the northern chamber, I beheld another statue, that of
Santiago de la Compostela. This chamber may have served as
a chapel at some later point in time, when a
convent once stood above the grotto. The chamber, located in
the central passage, served as a scriptatorium for the poet,
and was reported to be illuminated by a hanging alabaster lamp,
(08:55):
shedding its rays upon the mineral's rich encrusted walls and
overhead mirror of the chamber. How fine it must have
been for Brother Alexander to sit where he could write
and study to the sweet sounds of the nearby river,
charmed by the flow of projections cast by transient watercraft
reflected upon the starry studded passageways. Within Standing on a
(09:17):
bluff near to the River Thames is the Twickenham Parish
Church of Saint Mary the Virgin. This mount forms a
natural site where the village's first church once stood, possibly
during the Saxon era. In seventeen fourteen, Saint Mary's was
rebuilt in the red brick Queen Anne's style following an
earlier collapse, and adjoins the fifteenth century ragstone bell tower.
(09:39):
Brother Alexander is buried at the top of the nave,
next to the chancel and beside Charlotte, Countess of Drogeda,
and adjacent to his mother Edith Pope. His stone slab
is plainly inscribed with the letter P and remembered by
a brass memorial plate to his name. I then meandered
a few dozen yards down to the shore its neighboring
eel Po Island, calling my attention. Lush and wooded, situated
(10:04):
in the bubbling waters of the Teams it must have
been to the poet and Arcadian reverie. Nightfall in this
idyllic setting was particularly enchanting. My contemplations, resounding with these
immortal words of Alexander, Pope has expressed in his ecumenical
Universal Prayer to the whose temple is of space, whose
altar Earth sees skies one chorus, Let all beings raise
(10:28):
all Nature's incense, rise, Like and share this article, and
don't forget to subscribe to the channel. If you wish
to comment, please leave one and as a reminder, hit
the notifications bell. Any accompanying photographs or citations for this
article can be found in the corresponding print edition The
Scottish Right Journal is published by the Supreme Council of
(10:50):
the Scottish Rite Southern Jurisdiction Mother Supreme Council of the World.
Mark Dreisenstock, thirty third degree Managing Editor. I'm your host,
Matt be hours
Welcome to the Scottish Right Journal podcast and audio presentation
of the Scottish Right Journal, brought to you by the
Supreme Council of the Scottish Right Southern Jurisdiction Mother Supreme
Council of the World. This week's article is the Masonic
Traveler Reflections from the River in praise of the poet,
Mason and builder Alexander Pope, by Brother Jonathan R. Corbett,
(00:24):
Master Mason, and comes from the September October twenty twenty
five issue of the Scottish Right Journal. Happy the man
whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, contend
to breathe his native air in his own ground. Thus
wrote the great English Enlightenment poet and freemason Alexander Pope,
in the opening verse of his Ode to Solitude. These
(00:47):
lines are in a sense timeless and easily could be
quoted by any city dweller of the fast moving world
of today. They echo the poet's search for serenity, for
an escape from the spoil air of the city, its
matting crowds, the noise of towns of business, with its
clink and jingle of silver and gold, all set amid
the frequent passionate and violent outbursts of religious ellotry and
(01:09):
intolerance during the penultimate years of seventeenth century London. Far
from the glittering, climbing spires of Sir Christopher Wren's phoenix
like new metropolis of London, and ten miles still from
Hyde Park corner, it was to relative safety of Binfield
in Berkshire where Pope and his family retreated in seventeen hundred,
escaping the strict penal laws and force in the city.
(01:31):
Betwixt the waters and the wild of country life, the
pope household could find respite, and where the young lad
was able to discover his own elysium, blossoming and flourishing,
unburdened by the punitive disabilities of the age. Pope's love
for the countryside is exemplified in his poem Windsor Forest,
published in seventeen thirteen to great acclaim, wherein he describes
(01:52):
the Edenic landscape of hills and vales, woodlands and plains
of his new home. As we see here there interspersed
in lawns and opening glade, finn trees arise that shun
each other's shades. Here in full light, the Russet plains
extend there wrapped in cloud, the Bluish hills ascend, even
the wild heath displays her purple dyes amidst the desert,
(02:16):
fruitful fields arise. In seventeen sixteen, together with his parents,
Pope moved from Binfield to the village of Cheswick, near
enough to London to manage his literary and publishing affairs
and to be closer to his ever growing circle of
admirers and friends, such as John Gay, John Arbuthnot and
Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels, all of whom
(02:38):
would meet at the Scribblerus Club. The irishman Swift, the
Dean of Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, was to become
a close friend, inspiring and providing encouragement to his English counterpart.
The Poet's House in Twickenham would become Swift's home intermittently
while on leave from Ireland. It is quite possible that
both men would have attended Lodge together in London, as
(03:01):
the membership list for seventeen thirty indicates that both were
inscribed as members of the Goat at the foot of
the Haymarket in Covent Garden, the Masonic Temple was truly
one of the few venues existing at the time where
good men could meet on the level, leaving their religious
and political differences squarely at the door. When not collaborating
together at the villa in Twickenham, calling through papers of
(03:23):
sketches and ideas, they took diversionary rambles together in the
West Country and around Marble Hill near to Twickenham. Between
seventeen sixteen and seventeen nineteen, the Pope family resided at
a modest red brick terraced house in Chiswick, still standing today.
There Pope worked upon his translation of Homer's Iliad. Pope
(03:44):
became well known as a satirist in works such as
The Dunciad and The Rape of the Lock. He expressed
eloquently many of the ideas of the Enlightenment, ideals of
reason and tolerance in accord with Freemasonry in his philosophical
poem An Essay on Man. Even those who are unfamiliar
with Pope and his poetry likely have heard many of
the epigrams he penned. Pope springs eternal to err is human,
(04:09):
to forgive divine, A little learning is a dangerous thing,
and fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Pope's
literary achievements, success and mark upon the English language bear
witness to his genius and also to his herculean like
strength in overcoming his own severe personal health and physical challenges.
(04:29):
The young Alexander shrewdly invested his new found wealth and property,
and was able to move two years later with his
mother to his new tame's side abode in the rustic
village of Twickenham, which became a hub of friendship and
hospitality for decades, hence until the poet's demise in seventeen
forty four. Now as a country gentleman, he was able
to indulge his passions for experimental gardening and architecture, becoming
(04:53):
not just a speculative mason, but something of a builder himself.
Brother Alexander Savant, in the class forms of our Masonic
Five Order's tradition, lent his creative ken to the design
of his future home, his own retreat on the River.
Pope finally wrote to his Irish friend and portrait painter
Charles Jervis, it is here I have passed an entire
(05:14):
year of my life without any fixed abode in London,
and more than casting a transitory glance for a day
or two at most in a month on the pomps
of the town, sketched out times over, no doubt, in
his usual and inimitable way, then skillfully planned with two
leading architects of the time, fellow Catholics, James Gibbs and
(05:35):
William Kent. Pope's villa, modest and low in stature, was
quite the physical embodiment of this poet, artist and mason,
a monument in stone to the earthly form and unassuming
virtues of Pope himself. Given Pope's direct experience and knowledge
of the River Thames, it is unsurprising that this lively, flowing,
lustrous river should make a regular appearance in his poetry,
(05:59):
as we find reference in Windsor Forest and in his pastorals,
written at the age of sixteen. Here he invokes the
fair river to flow gently from its sacred spring in
the Cotswold Hills, while upon its banks he visions and
hears Sicilian muses in song. The graceful shores of the
Thames truly yield the brightest beauties, and the poet found
(06:19):
contentment shepherding his lambs by its flowing waters, seeking not
yonder ranges. His praise of the ancient river is further
expressed in these first four lines to his summer. The
second Pastoral or alexis a shepherd's boy. He seeks no
better name. Led forth his flocks along the Silver Team,
where sun dancing beams on the water played and verdant
(06:41):
alders formed a quivering shade. Pope's pride and joy was
his new villa, rising to four stories high, adorned with
portraits of his beloved friends, designed in Palladian fashion, and
backed by a riverside garden beckoning in splendor to all
those traveling on the river. He was later to acquire
lane and on the London Road side of his villa,
(07:02):
where he lived out his love of landscape gardening. Brother
Alexander was immensely proud of his achievement, and, writing seventeen
twenty to his friend Robert Digby, Pope declares, my building
rises high enough to attract the eye and curiosity of
the passenger from the river, where upon, beholding a mixture
of beauty and ruin, he inquires, what house is that?
(07:24):
Or what church is rising? Walking along the riverside on
this warm summer's day, enveloped by its blissfully balmy ambience,
dotted occasionally with fleecy clouds, my riparian stroll might well
have led to the villa. Yet the poet's house and
gardens are sadly no more, having been demolished, uprooted, and
redeveloped over the past two hundred years. However, his famous
(07:47):
uniconic labyrinthian grotto, with its formerly running springs, still exists today,
and hither I betook myself. Created with great ingenuity over
a period of twenty years, and universally celebrated thereafter, this
veritable chamber of reflections to use Masonic parlance, remains an
ever enchanting attraction, a physical relic of his former home.
(08:10):
My crossing over into the central chamber of the grotto
marked the start of a journey through time, walking in
Pope's footsteps. Entering this unique labyrinth of sparkling flints, gems,
mirrors and other worldliness, all resembling the tunnels of a
diamond mine. Suddenly a spacious, splendidly spangled side chamber appeared
from the south, revealing the statue of Roman Matrone. Then
(08:34):
in the northern chamber, I beheld another statue, that of
Santiago de la Compostela. This chamber may have served as
a chapel at some later point in time, when a
convent once stood above the grotto. The chamber, located in
the central passage, served as a scriptatorium for the poet,
and was reported to be illuminated by a hanging alabaster lamp,
(08:55):
shedding its rays upon the mineral's rich encrusted walls and
overhead mirror of the chamber. How fine it must have
been for Brother Alexander to sit where he could write
and study to the sweet sounds of the nearby river,
charmed by the flow of projections cast by transient watercraft
reflected upon the starry studded passageways. Within Standing on a
(09:17):
bluff near to the River Thames is the Twickenham Parish
Church of Saint Mary the Virgin. This mount forms a
natural site where the village's first church once stood, possibly
during the Saxon era. In seventeen fourteen, Saint Mary's was
rebuilt in the red brick Queen Anne's style following an
earlier collapse, and adjoins the fifteenth century ragstone bell tower.
(09:39):
Brother Alexander is buried at the top of the nave,
next to the chancel and beside Charlotte, Countess of Drogeda,
and adjacent to his mother Edith Pope. His stone slab
is plainly inscribed with the letter P and remembered by
a brass memorial plate to his name. I then meandered
a few dozen yards down to the shore its neighboring
eel Po Island, calling my attention. Lush and wooded, situated
(10:04):
in the bubbling waters of the Teams it must have
been to the poet and Arcadian reverie. Nightfall in this
idyllic setting was particularly enchanting. My contemplations, resounding with these
immortal words of Alexander, Pope has expressed in his ecumenical
Universal Prayer to the whose temple is of space, whose
altar Earth sees skies one chorus, Let all beings raise
(10:28):
all Nature's incense, rise, Like and share this article, and
don't forget to subscribe to the channel. If you wish
to comment, please leave one and as a reminder, hit
the notifications bell. Any accompanying photographs or citations for this
article can be found in the corresponding print edition The
Scottish Right Journal is published by the Supreme Council of
(10:50):
the Scottish Rite Southern Jurisdiction Mother Supreme Council of the World.
Mark Dreisenstock, thirty third degree Managing Editor. I'm your host,
Matt be hours
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