A Masque of Mercy

by Robert Frost

A Masque of Mercy, which is a modern rendition of the Book of Jonah, is the second of a pair of blank verse plays composed by Frost “on the linked subjects of justice and mercy, and the reason men applied toward the understanding of both” (Thompson and Winnick, 117)

Genres: Poetry, Plays, Drama, 20th Century

39 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1947

About the author

Flinty, moody, plainspoken and deep, Robert Frost was one of America's most popular 20th-century poets. Frost was farming in Derry, New Hampshire when, at the age of 38, he sold the farm, uprooted his family and moved to England, where he devoted himself to his poetry. His first two books of verse, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), were immediate successes. In 1915 he returned to the United States and continued to write while living in New Hampshire and then Vermont. His pastoral images of apple trees and stone fences -- along with his solitary, man-of-few-words poetic voice -- helped define the modern image of rural New England. Frost's poems include "Mending Wall" ("Good fences make good neighbors"), "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" ("Whose woods these are I think I know"), and perhaps his most famous work, "The Road Not Taken" ("Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- / I took the one less traveled by"). Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times: in 1924, 1931, 1937 and 1943. He also served as "Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress" from 1958-59; that position was renamed as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry (or simply Poet Laureate) in 1986.

Frost recited his poem "The Gift Outright" at the 1961 inauguration of John F. Kennedy... Frost attended both Dartmouth College and Harvard, but did not graduate from either school... Frost preferred traditional rhyme and meter in poetry; his famous dismissal of free verse was, "I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down."

Reviews

[Illiterate · Rating 4 out of 5]

...(cont.).... With God gone, there’s no reason to think justice will be done. Let’s hope Fate is merciful.

[David Campton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Got this as an unexpected gift from a friend yesterday having quoted it second hand for years. I devoured it in short order. It may take the form of a 4 hand Brechtian play in blank verse, placing 4 Biblical characters (Jonah, Paul, Jezebel and "My Brothers Keeper") in a contemporary New York bookshop, but it doesn't read like an easily staged piece of theatre and the poetry is so "blank" as to effectively be prose, if somewhat heightened/stylized prose. It is, rather, an artistic conceit that is there to offer and prompt theological/philosophical reflection on the place of justice and mercy in the Judeo-Christian world. Some have described it as anti-modernist, but that is to read some of Frost's other works into it. There is condemnation of "the city" but that comes from the perspective of the subsequently discredited Jonah. It is not so much a rejection of the modern world but a questioning of the twisted values that have underpinned the whole of western civilisation, and previous analyses of those. In this Frost gives a better reading of Jonah than most Old Testament scholars and preachers... demonstrating again the power of poets, dramatists and artists for unlocking the meaning of stories within scripture. I don't think that he quite gets Paul so well... but he had a wider corpus of texts attributed to him and has been thoroughly distorted by 2000 years of dogma and systematic theology. I would have liked a fuller exposition of the other two characters in order to offer greater balance to the piece, but since I was largely looking at this for Frost's perspective on the themes in Jonah it wasn't a major issue for me. I will undoubtedly return to this again and will seek out the partner piece "A Masque of Reason."

[Striker Zilt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful play to read, with both the main and tangential conversations very interesting and in depth. I personally enjoy this play more than Frost's only other play, "A Masque of Reason," because of the more interesting characters and the more modern setting.

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had similar thoughts about this one as about "A Masque of Reason," except at least this one didn't have God and Satan as actual characters. This one also had a very small handful of interesting thoughts on The Sermon on the Mount and the topic of Justice versus Mercy.

KEEPER: The Sermon on the Mount...
A beautiful impossibility...
An irresistible impossibility. A lofty beauty no one can live up to,
Yet no one turn from trying to live up to.

PAUL: Yes, spoken so we can't live up to it,
Yet so we'll have to weep because we can't.
Mercy is only to the undeserving...

[Gareth Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

A companion piece to A Masque of Reason based on the book of Jonah containing the usual wit but also a little harder to penetrate than its predecessor. Again in the form of a play but with more characters. Once again, a critique of mankind and God’s relationship with his creation.

[Craig Werner · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit better than a Masque of Reason. That's not high praise. This time Frost crams Jonah, Jezebel, Paul and "My Brother's Keeper" into a room and has them trade philosophical thoughts for a while. Basically, it's an anti-modernist manifesto that dances around a set of issues which are better dealt with either at much greater length or in the epigrammatic style, verging on silence, of the mystics. Paid my dues with Frost's drama and now I get to go back to the last couple of volumes of poetry as I finish my grand tour of Frost. The only reason to spend time on the Masques is if you're writing a dissertation on "The Minor Frost."

[Pradip dubey]

it is fresh and cool work of frost

[Michael Arnold · Rating 2 out of 5]

An odd play, this is. I hadn't the first clue just what in the hell was going on.