Poe's Allegory In 'The May-Pole Of Merry Mount'

Theirs was a life of hard work, morning and evening prayers, and religious study. They did not believe in the frivolous behavior of the people of Merry Mount. In the story, Hawthorne referred to one group as “gay sinners" with their may-pole and the other as "grisly saints” with their whipping post. While the Puritans came to America to practice religious freedom and tolerance, their actions show how intolerant they were to the beliefs of others. Not only were they intolerant, but they cruelly tried to force their beliefs onto others.
The fourth of Hawthorne’s literary pieces, “The Minister’s Black Veil” included a religious allegory concerning man’s secret sin and his fall. Mr. Hooper put on a veil and vowed to never take it off. The townspeople began to wonder if he had a secret sin that he was hiding. At first they were perplexed, and then they avoided him unless they were in great need of his religious

Several of Poe’s works, “The Raven,” “Annabelle Lee,” and “Ligeia”, seem to be an exploration of the dark side of losing his parents at an early age, or the loss of his wife. In Ligeia, he struggles with the death of his young wife. In his grief, he becomes more aware of her finer qualities, traits that he may not have appreciated to the same degree prior to her death. In this and other Poe stories, some of his characters are under the influence of opium, which may contribute to their (and possibly Poe’s) dark, melancholy thoughts. Poe used a fissure as a symbolism of a crack in the foundation of the house and in the family in “The House of Usher.” In “The Black Cat”, he may have used the name Pluto as a symbol of an allegorical reference to a mythical God of the underworld—a dark place much like in the mind of the of his main character and the