Abstract
between Puritans and hedonists differ strikingly from 19th century versions of the affair. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in The Maypole of Merry Mount, and John Lothrop Motley, in Merry-Mount: A Romance of the Massachusetts Colony, both acknowledge that the Maypole revelries expressed needs that the Puritans controlled with undue severity. But both of these writers, typifying a 19th century attitude, acquiesce in the destruction of Merry Mount. Motley sees the settlement as a vestige of decadent feudalism, while Hawthorne finds the hedonists' behavior existentially superficial in comparison with the Puritans' preoccupation with sin and sorrow. In our own time, however, Richard L. Stokes and Robert Lowell have taken a dark view of the 17th century police raid. Stokes' dramatic poem Merry Mount depicts violence and insanity as the outcome of Puritan repression; Lowell's Endecott and the Red Cross presents the whole Merry Mount confrontation, but particularly the Puritans' assault on the settlement, as a paradigm of the savage power games with which civilized men fill their lives.1 Lowell and
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