10 - A Masque of Reason

Summary

Published on what he thought was his seventieth birthday in 1945, this masque, or play, based on the Old Testament book of Job, is a wide-ranging and humorous exchange between a husband and wife pair and God. Coming on the heels of his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection A Witness Tree, the fact that he found the time to write this play may have –indirectly—been a product of the difficulty of civilian travel during World War II and the related reduction in demand for his services. Consequently, after years of hectic travel, professional commitments, and family obligations, Frost found himself with time to think and write. Frost's appointment at Dartmouth College only required him to meet with students on weekends during the school year, leaving ample time for gardening at his winter home in South Miami, Florida and on his farm in Ripton, Vermont, close to the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference that he participated in each summer.

Despite the simple and rather timeless setting on a desert island, the masque contains allusions to many of Frost's favorite scientific topics including the theory of relativity, the theory of evolution, and the expansion of the universe. The concept of time reversal, a prediction of the theory of relativity, appears when the Job character notes that his wife felt younger “by a thousand years” and God casually explains that the two had gotten their “age reversed,” something that became possible once it was discovered that time was a dimension of space (ll. 156–161). When Job confronts God on the subjects of creation and evolution, God responds in a way that blurs the lines between religion and science, referring to the “science of Genesis” (ll. 193–194). And Job is confused by God's apparent insistence that the wonders of nature are all just “lucky blunders” (l. 260). Finally, Job tries out his own interpretation of the stellar red-shift, resisting the idea that it implies an expanding universe, suggesting instead that it is just the starlight fading away (l. 345).

Sadly, one reason that Frost may have had the time to write this interesting and thought-provoking work was that he had lost so many members of his family.