e gave Native people one free item, salt, to encourage food-preservation and “settling down” --- because that was the least disruptive way for Englishmen to recognize their presences. Morton let readers think he saw “the Lord’s Angel” in New England’s epidemics, but he laced this with irony and pointed The Bible at England. He said Native people had “no religion,” but showed how it was everywhere in their world.
Morton said one race “must rule, or no quietness”; but which race really held the power, he revealed as uncertain. And, Morton was laying out America in his day book in terms of commodities---Book II of Canaan. These kinds of imperial assumptions stripped more than fur-bearing animals from the landscape. Morton’s hand was turned to it. But the entire work he also packed with unmatched feeling for nature, and a demand for “respect”: he flanked it with Native America’s laudable substance (Book I), and then with a How Not To Colonize manual (Book III), whose round comedies are represented here by the tale of “Master Bubble,” below. It stands among the country’s first multicultural short stories. He was trying to educate a juggernaut.
Minimize Canaan’s impact. Deconstruct Morton’s motives. Even when the long Pious-Imperial Period of American History and Literature quarantined both, they had their effects. Hawthorne, William Carlos Williams and later rogue historians and naturalists deployed the man and his work in defense of the continent and its humanity. See Still Here and Revels At Merrymount Today for more.
So what did the new-christened Ma-Re Mount, or Merrymount have to say? First, a solemn, half-intelligible manifesto: a “Poem” proclaiming through a “love story” that the future America needed a day, every year, to remember what was sacred --- by coming to terms with terrible events, by confronting death and choosing life. The Revels are the “medicine” offered from Ma-Re Mount. Then the drinking- “Song”, whose first word in each simple verse spelled out Morton’s formula: Make/Nectar/Give/Give. Sung “with a Chorus” of youths with pick-up instruments, the “Song” invited (or if you will, half-obliged) everybody to join hands in a great circle around the Maypole.
Scholarship revels in the show of power behind English masques. These Revels showed the power of interdependence, cooperation and tolerance. They happened because Native New England allowed them. Feasting, sports, hunts, music, dance and entertainments, trade, “cohabitations” --- from there, it was up to these people(s) to make what they would of the world in their midst.
Were Plimothers invited? It seems some attended: Bradford mentioned “scurrilous” verses nailed to the Maypole (2: 49) and much “frisking,” of “fairies, or Furies, rather.” Morton’s “Revels” chapter says they “could not expound” The Poem’s Riddle: it “put their noses out of joint, as the proverb is.” Morton imagined the Maypole rearing up over them like a “seven-headed Hydra”: a core of six men around him (likely some with families) who had, like a Hydra, too much reach for Plimoth’s liking.
“At defiance with” the Maypole, “Some of them affirmed that the first institution thereof was in memory of a whore; not knowing that it was a trophy erected at first in honor of Maya, the Lady of Learning, which they despise….”(140).
Compassion and the courage to try new things were at these Revels’ core. “Reading The Revels” shows more behind each line of both creations.
Listen below to Morton’s original “Poem,” and read along with the “modernized” version --- which tries to help us hear it with 1627 English ears. Your reactions are most welcome!
Rise, riddle-reader, and unfold
What meant this whirlpool, Death, beneath the mold
When woman, solitary on the ground
Sitting and weeping her children was found?
Then Deities, love-inspiring, did acquaint
Grim King James with the tenor of her plaint,
and caused him send forth heroes, to the sound
of trumpet loud; at which, those seas were found
so full of shifting shapes that this bold shore
presented Woman a new paramour,
as strong as Samson (wasn't); and so