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A NOTE ON FROST'S A MASQUE OF REASON I SHOULD LIKE TO SUPPLY A NOTE on two points raised concerning Frost's A Masque of Reason by Ely Stock in his article, "A Masque of Reason and /. B.: Two Treatments of the Book of Job," Modern Drama, III (Spring, 1961), 378-386. The first is his comment on the companion passages: The myrrh tree gives it. Smell the rosin burning? The ornaments the Greek artificers Made for the Emperor Alexius, The Star of Bethlehem, the pomegranates, The birds, seem all on fire with Paradise. And hark, the gold enameled nightingales Are singing. Yes, and look, the Tree is troubled. and Now someone can light up the Burning Bush And turn the gold enameled artificial birds on. I recognized them. Greek artificers Devised them for Alexius Comnenus.1 Mr. Stock rejects Ivor Winters' dismissal of these speeches as mere rhetoric;2 and he says that "the lines must be considered in relation to the meaning of the playas a whole" (p. 383). But he comes no nearer than Winters does to clarifying the relation. His only explanation is: Their beauty and rich rhetorical tone serve as a sharp contrast to the light, irreverent, conversational tone of the main body of the play. Their lush quality sets off the absurd plight of a troubled God, caught in the branches of a tree. They serve, too, as a serious reminder that the theme has relevance for all mankind, whether pagan or Christian, just as do the allusions to the "incense tree," "Burning Bush," and "Christmas Tree," at the beginning of the play. In the end the birds which seemed "on fire with Paradise," become merely "gold enameled artificial birds," which will not even show up in the picture Thyatira is to snap. ''That's too bad," she says, acknowledging that there has been a failure to answer the very significant problems posed by the Book of Job (p. 383). Neither critic has pointed out the meaning of the collection of references in the lines, nor its relevance to the conception of God presented in the play. Far from being simply bits of "lush" writing, the passages 1. Robert Frost, A Masque of Reason (New York, 1945), pp. 2, 23. 2. Ivor Winters, "Robert Frost: or, the Spiritual Drifter as Poet," Sewanee RBtliew, LVI (Autumn, 1948), 581. 426 1962 NOTE ON A MASQUE OF REASON 427 are an accumulation of highly charged symbols. Most of the images are taken directly from the last stanza of "Sailing to Byzantium." Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enameling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.3 Frost's deliberate use of Yeats' terms is a clear indication that he is directing attention to Yeats' subject, that of the life of the artistic imagination and its "Monuments of its own magnificance." Since in both passages Frost links the burning bush, which Job calls "The Christma~ Tree" (p. 1), with Yeats' images, he implies that the tree from which God appears is also a creation of man's imagination. The whole conception of God in A Masque of Reason is anthropomorphic; and Frost appropriately uses Yeats' terms, in keeping with the highly allusive style of all the dialogue, to establish at the beginning and end of the play its central meaning. The other interpretation of Mr. Stock about which I should like to raise a question is that of Job's wife, whom he calls, "a cosmopolitan, witty, bright, modem woman" (p. 380). She is indeed modern; but she is only so cosmopolitan as her references to the games of twenty questions and charades, a vague feminism, the mistrust of "tendencies," and the taking of snapshots can make her. I find her neither witty, nor very bright. Much of Frost's best fun in the play comes from his laughter at her simple-minded, chatty sociability, which Frost, with an opposite satiric thrust at...

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