SOURCE: Murphy, Edith. “‘A Rich Widow, Now to Be Tane Up or Laid Downe’: Solving The Riddle of Thomas Morton's ‘Rise Oedipeus.’” William and Mary Quarterly, third series LIII, No. 4 (October 1996): 755-68.

In the following essay, Murphy conducts a “gender analysis” of the poem “Rise Oedipus” in New English Canaan. In the poem, as in the book as a whole, Murphy contends, the land represents a widow, “her deceased husband the Indians, and her new husband the Pilgrims,” who are weak and incompetent. Morton presents himself as the “virile lover who has all the masculine qualities the new husband lacks,” she notes.

On May 1, 1627, Thomas Morton and his men erected a Maypole at Mt. Wollaston, formerly Passonagessit, in Massachusetts Bay. The eighty-foot pole, with a pair of buck horns attached near the top, stood on a hill overlooking the ocean in what is now Quincy, Massachusetts, in sight...