[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 extended his challenge to Oedipus, that great unriddler of antiquity, whom he summoned in his opening lines:

Rise Oedipus, and, if thous canst, unfould
What meanes Caribdis underneath the mould,
When Scilla sollitary on the ground
(Sitting in forme of Niobe) was found,
Till Amphitrites Darling did acquaint
Grim Neptune with the Tenor of her plaint,
And caused him send forth Triton with the sound
Of Trumpet loud, at which the Seas were found
So full of Protean formes that the bold shore
Presented Scilla a new parramore
So stronge as Sampson and so patient
As Job himselfe, directed thus, by fate,
To comfort Scilla so unfortunate.
I doe professe, by Cupid's beautious mother,
Here's Scogans choise for Scilla, and none other;
Though Scilla's sick with grief, because no signe
Can there be found of vertue masculine.
Esculapius come; I know right well
His laboure's lost when you may ring her Knell.
The fatall sisters doome none can withstand,
Nor Citherea's powre, who poynts to land
With proclamation that the first of May
At Ma-re Mount shall be kept hollyday.(2)

It is small wonder that these lines proved puzzling even to a people as well versed in classical mythology as many of the early colonists of New England were.³ In characteristic Renaissance fashion, Greek and Roman gods and Hebrew heroes are catalogued together and many mythological characters appear as dramatis personae in a single brief poem. Morton's familiarity with Renaissance rhetorical conventions is demonstrated by an occasional periphrasis. (“Amphitrites Darling” and “Citherea's powre” are two examples.)⁴ In some cases it is obvious that Morton uses mythological allusions merely to emphasize attributes of character; the strength of Samson and the patience of Job are proverbial, for instance, and it is probable that Morton meant no more than what meets the eye by alluding to these two Biblical heroes. But even if we eliminate Samson and Job from the poem and with them the Hebraic dimension of Morton's mythology, we are still faced with a difficult problem of interpretation. For instance, no surviving myth links Scylla to Charybdis as a lover; Charybdis, in fact, is, like Scylla, a female, and her story has to do with the sin of gluttony and its punishment by Zeus. Scylla and Charybdis have nothing in common except their sex and the fact that they are both terrors to mariners; they flank the Straits of Messina through which both Odysseus and his men and Jason and his Argonauts passed in their wanderings. And who is “Amphitrites Darling”?⁵ How does Aesculapius come to be in the company of all these sea deities? If the answers to these and other enigmas are in the poem, they are far from obvious.

However Aesculapius may fit into the picture—and we shall have more to say about that later—there is mythological precedent for some of the details in Morton's poem. Scylla's association with sea gods, for example, is well documented. One version of her story is that after Poseidon, god of the sea, had abducted and wed Amphitrite, he developed the roving eye that seems to have been the special curse of Greek deities. His glance lighted on Scylla, daughter of Phorkys and Hecate, but Amphitrite, once wed, proved a jealous wife. When she learned of her husband's other interests, she put magic herbs in Scylla's bathing place. Scylla was transformed from the loins down into a horrid monster. She was encircled with a ring of dogs' heads and according to tradition became the scourge of sailors who had to pass through the Straits of Messina.

The story retains its basic outlines in Ovid's Metamorphoses XIV, but some of the characters have been changed. Scylla's transformation in Ovid's version is caused by Circe, who is jealous of the attention paid to Scylla by Glaucus, an ex-mortal who has been changed into a minor sea deity. When Glaucus brings his lover's plaint to Circe and requests that she give him a charm which will make him attractive to Scylla, Circe offers herself as a substitute lover. Offended by Glaucus' refusal, Circe poisons Scylla's bathing water with magic herbs that produce the same results as Amphitrite's potion.⁶

For most later writers and translators of Ovid the allegorical significance of Scylla's change was transparent. Natalis Comes in his commentary on Mythology saw her and her partner, Charybdis, as allegories of sensual pleasure and voluptuous desire. “What is life,” he asked, “but a diligent and continuous voyage among various temptations and illegitimate desires?” Edmund Spenser, who seems to have borrowed a good deal of his mythology from Comes, agreed with this interpretation and developed it through several stanzas in his Faerie Queene, Book II, Canto XII. George Sandys, speaking only of Scylla, thought that since the upper part of her body “is feigned to retaine a humane figure, and the lower to be bestiall,” she “intimates how man, a divine creature, … can never so degenerate into a beast, as when he giveth himself over to the loe delights of those baser parts of the body.”⁷ In reading Scylla as an allegory of lust, Sandys seems to have spoken for most writers and mythographers of his own and previous generations.

But not all writers saw things the same way. In composing Scillaes Metamorphosis or Glaucus and Silla (1589), the single most important work in English literature to make extensive use of Scylla's sad tale as its source, Thomas Lodge built upon Ovid and, probably, upon Ronsard's Complainte de Glauce a Scylle Nimphe, but he gave the story a new moral, added numerous rhetorical embellishments, included a catalogue of feminine beauties in praise of Scylla, introduced several new characters, and in short metamorphosed Ovid's tale considerably. In Lodge's version, Glaucus, with the aid of his mother, Thetis, and magic arrows from Cupid, is cured of his lover's infatuation, and Scylla, in turn, is made to fall in love with him. Despairing, Scylla flees out to sea. Lodge sees Scylla's fate as a warning to all fair maidens to beware of “proud back-sliding” and concludes his poem with a profitable moral: “Nimphs must yield, when faithfull lovers straie not.”⁸

Myth, the Metamorphoses, and Lodge's poem are the three most likely sources Thomas Morton might have turned to for information about Scylla. They have little in common with his work except a character named Scylla who is also one of a pair of unhappy lovers. From the myth of Scylla and Poseidon and from Ovid's story Morton appears to have borrowed nothing, or, at most, the idea that Scylla and the sea are somehow connected. The only link between his Scylla and theirs is made indirectly, in the periphrastic and parenthetical “Sitting in form of Niobe.” Here the allusion is both to Niobe's grief at the loss of her children and to the fact that Niobe, like Scylla, turned into stone. But the chief reason for naming the female character in “Rise Oedipus” Scylla instead of something else seems to be that Morton wished to draw on the standard allegorical associations of Scylla with the sin of lust. Morton would probably have found Lodge's Scylla to his liking had he read Lodge's poem, for Glaucus and Silla is characterized by a sensuousness of imagery and rhythm that is congenial to the spirit in which much of The New English Canaan is written. Again, however, there are no really striking resemblances, and though Lodge's work is interesting as a development of the character of Scylla and as a distant analogue for Morton's character, there is no conclusive evidence that Morton was familiar with the earlier poem.

Though Morton's Scylla seems to have no close relatives in previous myth or literature, his catalogue of sea gods is fairly conventional. The convention seems to have originated with Virgil's Aeneid, when Father Neptune's “manifold retinue” is presented:

The vast sea-creatures, the ancient train of Glaucus,
Palaemon son of Ino, the speedy Tritons,
The whole parade of Phorcus and on the left
Thetis and Melite, and Panopea the virgin;
The Nereid Nesaee, Cymodoce, Thalia and Spio.(9)

The same year, 1637, that Morton's book appeared in print is also the date generally given for Nicolas Poussin's The Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite, which, like Morton's poem, builds upon classical myth (mostly as recounted in Hyginus) and, to some extent, upon the work of earlier artists (Raphael's Galatea and the relief of Tritons and Sea Nymphs in the palace of Prince Giustiniani, his patron) but which relies, finally, mostly on the fresh interpretations of its creator for form and content. The Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite was painted on a commission of Cardinal Richelieu and depicts the moment at which Amphitrite is overtaken by and simultaneously wed to Neptune. The sea is intricately embroidered with the figures of the retinue of each deity and overhead is a host of putti shooting arrows and strewing the blossoms that signify marriage. Though it is certain that Morton had never seen this painting, the coincidence of its composition in 1637 helps to establish the popularity of the “sea deities” motif in seventeenth-century European art and thus suggests one reason why Morton may have been drawn to the device.¹⁰

Among Morton's immediate literary contemporaries, no less a writer than the great John Milton carried on the tradition in Comus, also first published in 1637. The Attendant Spirit in Milton's work invokes Sabrina (the river Severn) to appear in the name of

                                                            great Oceanus,
By the earth-shaking Neptune's mace,
And Tethys' grave majestic pace,
By hoary Nereous' wrinkled look,
And the Carpathian wizard's hook,
By scaly Triton's winding shell,
And old sooth-saying Glaucus' spell,
By Leucothea's lovely hands,
And her son that rules the strands,
By Thetis' tinsel-slipper'd feet,
And the Songs of Sirens sweet,
By dead Parthenope's dear tomb,
And fair Ligea's golden comb …
By all the Nymphs that nightly dance,
Upon thy streams with wily glance. …(11)

A still more elaborate catalogue may be found in Spenser's Faerie Queene. Spenser presents an extensive list of sea deities covering many lines, but three stanzas should serve to give an accurate impression of his manner and method:

First came great Neptune with his threeforkt mace,
          That rules the Seas, and makes them rise or fall;
          His dewy locks did drop with brine apace,
          Under his Diademe imperiall:
          And by his side his Queene with coronall,
          Faire Amphitrite, most divinely faire,
          Whose ivorie shoulders weren covered all,
          As with a robe, with her own silver haire,
And deckt with pearls, which th'Indian seas for her prepaire.
These marched farre afore the other crew:
          And all the way before them as they went,
          Triton his trompet shrill before them blew,
          For goodly triumph and great jollyment,
          That made the rocks to roare, as they were rent.
          And after them the royal issue came,
          Which of them sprung by lineall descent:
          First the Sea-gods, which to themselves doe clame
The powre to rule the billowes, and the waves to tame.
Phorcys, the father of that fatall brood,
          By whom those old Heroes wonne such fame;
          And Glaucus, that wise southsayes understood;
          And tragick Inoes sonne, the which became
          A God of seas through his mad mothers blame,
          Now hight Palemon, and is saylers frend;
          Great Brontes, and Astraeus, that did shame
          Him selfe with incest of his kin unkend;
And huge Orion, that doth tempests still portend.(12)

Morton's catalogue of sea deities and, to some extent, his entire poem seems to owe more to Virgil than to Spenser, though from The Faerie Queene he might have gotten the idea of conjoining a wedding ceremony with allusions to sea gods. Spenser's catalogue is, in fact, a list of the distinguished guests who attend the “bridale feast” held in Proteus' house in honor of the wedding of the Medway and Thames Rivers; the guests come to bless the union and make it fruitful. Sea gods are also associated with generation and fertility in The Aeneid: the sea is explicitly identified as the birthplace of Venus.¹³ Neptune reminds that amorous goddess: “‘It is entirely right, Cytherea, to place your trust / In my realm of sea, from whence you arose yourself.’” This may also suggest an alternate reading to one of Morton's more puzzling periphrases, for since Venus comes from the sea she can be considered the offspring of Neptune and Amphitrite, hence “Amphitrites Darling.” Further, in The Aeneid Venus does “acquaint / Grim Neptune with the Tenor of her plaint,” just as “Amphitrites Darling” does in Morton's poem. Venus' problem in Virgil's work is that Juno's hostility has proved so harmful to her plans for her favorite, Aeneas, that she, Venus, wants assurances from Neptune that Aeneas will be permitted to reach Italy and the Tiber River. The complaint of Morton's Venus is considerably less complicated and seems to be only that Scylla lacks a lover; Neptune helps to produce a new one. The relevant lines in The Aeneid are translated as follows:

                                                            In the meanwhile Venus,
Frantic with cares, unburdened herself to Neptune
In a flood of heart-felt complaints. …

(V, 116-17)

In spite of these distant echoes of The Aeneid and, perhaps, still fainter echoes of The Faerie Queene, Morton's mythology seems to be mostly his own invention. Whatever he may have borrowed from earlier writers was borrowed discretely and adapted to a new context, in the process of which it was greatly altered. We were warned that Morton's lines were “Enigmattically composed”—indeed, he even referred to the poem as a “Riddle”—and so they have proved to be. Mythological names have been used in new, allegorical, and fanciful ways to present veiled allusions to the subject about which the riddle was written, rather than to allude to the original myth itself. But Morton also said that his verses fit “the occurrents of the time,” and perhaps that is the clue we have overlooked. If we step back from the poem and do not allow ourselves to be confused by the specific mythological names, we may find that in a general way most of the characters are familiar. They correspond to the central actors in ancient fertility rituals. There is a dead lover, a wailing woman, a doctor; there is a ritualistic union of some kind and there is close proximity to water, an essential element of the setting of fertility rituals.¹⁴ Even the surrogate lover, “Scogans choise for Scilla,” may have precedent in folk festivals celebrating the return of the productive powers of nature; Robert Elliott, in his study of satire, paraphrases Enid Welsford's hypothesis that the court-fool may have come from primitive ritual: “There is good reason to believe that in the great periodic rituals which called for the death and rebirth of the priest-king, a mock-king was eventually substituted for the actual king. In places, it seems, the role of the mock-king was taken by a pharmakos, a mocking, jeering buffoon—a fool, in fact—who had been ritually delegated to take upon himself the evils of the community and who would be slain in place of the king, or, in a modification of the original rite, would be beaten and driven from the village.”¹⁵ Morton's riddle, then, may refer poetically and allegorically to Merrymount's version of the fertility festivals of spring, though it is doubtful from the evidence of the poem that he was aware of these remote folk analogues to the revels he describes. The role of the doctor in particular seems to have changed between the time the festival came into being originally and the May morning when these early New Englanders celebrated the triumph of the generative powers of nature; in Morton's poem the doctor appears as a second surrogate mate for Scylla after the first replacement fails to show any sign of “virtue masculine.” He does not restore the “dead” Charybdis but takes his place instead.¹⁶

Having read Bradford's account of the Bacchanalian revels at Merrymount and having encountered Hawthorne's story based at least in part upon Bradford's words, we are not likely to be surprised by this unveiling of Morton's enigma. Though Donald Connors is surely correct to note that the Maypole at Merrymount brings into sharp focus a long history of political and ecclesiastical strife which had been raging in England and which was about to erupt into civil war, more is at stake than a political conflict.¹⁷ Rather, Morton's poem and the ritual it celebrates serve to draw the line indelibly between a Pilgrim and Puritan culture, in which man's only relationship to nature was one of hostility and enmity, and the nearly pagan culture at Morton's plantation, where men propitiated vegetation deities and, perhaps without being aware of all that they were doing, sought to coexist peacefully and harmoniously with the invisible powers of the natural world.

Notes

1. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. S. E. Morison (New York, 1952), p. 206.

2. Thomas Morton, “The Poem: ‘Rise Oedipus,’” The New English Canaan, ed. Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (Boston, 1883), pp. 277-78. Further references to Morton's work are to this edition and will be indicated by page number only.

3. In his Thomas Morton (New York, 1969), p. 98, Donald Connors remarks that “Rise Oedipus” is “a maze of Classical and Biblical allusions representing, allegorically, some contemporary occurrence.” He hazards no guesses as to what that occurrence might have been, but adds the comment that Morton's explanation of the poem is at times as confusing as the poem itself. Certainly Morton's explanation is neither complete nor entirely trustworthy, since he neglects to gloss several allusions—the reference to Aesculapius is a case in point—and since he may have wished to give an incorrect reading in an effort to discredit the Pilgrims' and Puritans' reports of Merrymount's sins. Further, most of the explanation is delivered in a mocking and ironic tone of voice, so that it is difficult to say for certain what Morton's attitude toward his own explication is.

4. Connors notes (p. 68) that euphuism and rhetorical embellishments of this sort are among Morton's favorite figures of speech.

5. See Morton's explanation of this periphrasis on p. 281, when he implies that the antecedent of “her” is not “Amphitrites Darling,” but the woman he names Scylla. Amphitrite, he says, “is an arme of the Sea, by which the newes was carried up and downe of a rich widow, now to be tane up or laid downe.”

6. Morton's familiarity with Ovid is documented numerous times by both Connors and Adams.

7. Comes is quoted in the notes to Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book II, ed. Edwin Greenlaw (Baltimore, 1933), p. 351; the passage from Sandys is cited in Daniel Norton and Peters Rushton, Classical Myths in English Literature (New York, 1935), pp. 343-44.

8. Thomas Lodge, “Glaucus and Silla,” Glaucus and Silla, with Other Lyrical and Pastoral Poems (Chiswick, 1819), p. 33.

9. Virgil, The Aeneid, ed. and trans. Patric Dickinson (New York, 1961), V, 118. Dickinson's edition does not provide line numbers and hence further references to Virgil's poem will be by book and page number only.

   Connors (p. 39) suggests that Morton was familiar with Virgil on the strength of Morton's “Cheecatawback's Vision” passage, which resembles both the episode in which Aeneas receives the orders of Jupiter at Carthage and the episode in which the hero observes the Sibyl in her cave.

10. Walter Friedlaender, Nicolas Poussin: A New Approach. The Library of Great Painters (New York, n.d.), pp. 134-35.

11. John Milton, Paradise Regained, The Minor Poems, and Samson Agonistes, ed. Merritt Hughes (New York, 1937), pp. 262-63, ll. 867-80, 883-84.

12. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book IV, ed. Ray Heffner (Baltimore, 1935), Canto XI, xi-xiii, pp. 139-40.

13. Morton was familiar with the folk idea that seafood is an aphrodisiac and restorer of fertility, and he also mentions the fact that the sea is renowned as the birthplace of Venus. Speaking of the “Barren Doe of Virginia,” he comments on her remarkable increase in fertility: “The Country New Canaan doth afford such plenty of Lobsters and other delicate shellfish, and Venus is said to be borne of the Sea …” (p. 265).

14. For a thorough analysis of the stock characters of primitive fertility rituals see Jesse Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Garden City, 1957), esp. pp. 34-48, 52-64, and 101-12.

15. Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, 1960), p. 138.

16. The dramatic properties strongly implicit in Morton's lines (and in the entire New English Canaan for that matter) are difficult to overlook. Quite possibly the poem refers obliquely to the characters in a pantomime play composed for the occasion by Morton himself; at any rate, he appears to have been familiar with drama and dramatic forms. Some of the actors, representing Charybdis, Scylla, Venus, Neptune, Triton, the “new paramour,” and Aesculapius, may even have had lines to speak. This is of course conjectural, but if the hypothesis is correct and Morton's poem does refer to a folk-inspired drama actually performed at Merrymount, the verses are the only evidence we have of any dramatic performances of any kind in early New England.

17. Connors, p. 99.