SOURCE: Arner, Robert D. “Mythology and the Maypole of Merrymount: Some Notes on Thomas Morton's ‘Rise Oedipus.’” Early American Literature VI, No. 2 (Fall 1971): 156-64.

In the following essay, Arner examines how the poem “Rise Oedipus,” which appears in New English Canaan, adapts classical mythology to present an allegorical description of the revels at Ma-re Mount.

Well over three hundred years ago, Thomas Morton composed several poems characterized by one of his contemporaries, Governor William Bradford, as “sundry rhymes and verses, some tending to lasciviousness, and others to the detraction and scandal of some persons, which he affixed to … [the] idle or idol maypole.”¹ Morton seems to have been particularly proud of one of these verses and challenged all “Separatists” in the Bay Colony area to explicate it. They failed in the attempt, as Morton reports in The New English Canaan, and, perhaps emboldened by their failure, he rhetorically...