Episode 81
From ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning
Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning.
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Poet
Reading and commentary by
From ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’
Into the street the Piper stept,
Smiling first a little smile,
As if he knew what magic slept
In his quiet pipe the while;
Then, like a musical adept,
To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled,
And green and blue his sharp eyes twinkled,
Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled;
And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered,
You heard as if an army muttered;
And the muttering grew to a grumbling;
And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.
Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,
Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,
Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,
Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,
Families by tens and dozens,
Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives –
Followed the Piper for their lives.
From street to street he piped advancing,
And step for step they followed dancing,
Until they came to the river Weser
Wherein all plunged and perished
– Save one who, stout as Julius Caesar,
Swam across and lived to carry
(As he the manuscript he cherished)
To Rat-land home his commentary,
Which was, ‘At the first shrill notes of the pipe,
I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,
And putting apples, wondrous ripe,
Into a cider-press’s gripe:
And a moving away of pickle-tub-boards,
And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards,
And a drawing the corks of train-oil-flasks,
And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks;
And it seemed as if a voice
(Sweeter than by harp or by psaltery
Is breathed) called out, Oh rats, rejoice!
The world is grown to one vast drysaltery!
So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!
And just as one bulky sugar-puncheon,
Ready staved, like a great sun shone
Glorious scarce an inch before me,
Just as methought it said, Come, bore me!
– I found the Weser rolling o’er me.’
Podcast transcript
First of all today, we interrupt our usual programming for a little good news. I’ve just discovered this week that last year, The Guardian newspaper included A Mouthful of Air in a list of five of the best poetry podcasts, with a nice review.
I’m not sure how I missed it at the time, but it’s always nice to see something like this, as a sign that I’m making some progress in my mission to bring poems to the world. Obviously, reviews aren’t my main motivation for doing the show, that’s always been about finding a poem I love and sharing it with you and seeing if you like it too. But what a review does do is let me know that the podcast is getting out there in the world and connecting poems with listeners in the way I want it to.
So before we move on, I would like to congratulate you on your good taste in listening to A Mouthful of Air, and to thank you for listening and helping me get the poems out there. And thank you also, if you have liked or reviewed or shared the podcast in any shape or form, it is tremendously helpful in finding new listeners to the show.
Okay, on with the poetry! Today’s piece is another poetic version of a traditional story that proved to be very influential. A couple of episodes ago, we looked at Ovid’s retelling of the story of Daedalus and Icarus in his Metamorphoses. This time we have Robert Browning and his 1842 version of the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
Like Daedalus and Icarus, this is almost certainly a tale you’re already familiar with, so once again, the pleasure we derive from the poetic version comes from seeing what the poet does with the material.
Starting with the legend itself, I looked into this, in preparation for the podcast. And amazingly, it turns out that the story of the Pied Piper does seem to have a basis in an actual historical event in the town of Hamelin in Lower Saxony in Germany. Numerous accounts from the Middle Ages onwards attest that in 1284, something occurred in the town that resulted in the loss of 130 children. One of the oldest texts is inscribed in Latin on a house in the town of Hamelin. It states:
‘In the year 1284, on the day of Saints John and Paul, on 26th of June, 130 children born in Hamelin were lured by a Piper, clothed in many colours, to Calvary near the Koppen, and lost.’
‘Calvary near the Koppen’ refers to a local hill or mountain, and this is just one of many accounts from the Middle Ages onwards that records the same date and the same number of children being spirited away from the town. Interestingly, the part of the story where the Piper gets rid of the rats is a later addition, and doesn’t appear until 1559.
So something does seem to have happened in Hamelin in the 13th century that meant the town lost a significant number of children. and scholars and historians are still investigating and debating exactly what could have led to this very strange and unsettling legend. Explanations include illness, possibly the plague. Or St. Vitus’ Dance, the dancing mania that swept Europe in the late Middle Ages, and there is a documented case of a group of children jumping and dancing about 12 miles between the German towns of Erfurt and Arnstadt, in 1237. Another possible explanation is a landslide or sinkhole that may have swallowed up some of the town’s citizens.
One theory that seems to hold quite a bit of scholarly credence is the idea of emigration to Eastern Europe. In this explanation, ‘children of the town’ wouldn’t necessarily have meant young children; it could simply have meant people who were born in the town. So, in this scenario, it may well have been young adults who were persuaded by a government recruiter whose job was to encourage Germans to emigrate to Eastern Europe, for political and economic reasons.
There’s some quite interesting research by one scholar who started with the surnames in Hamelin town records from the 13th century and then searched telephone directories in 20th-century Poland, and found quite a few names occurring in both places. So it’s possible the exodus from the town involved people who went willingly, lured by the promises of a recruiter. As we know, whether you’re recruiting for the military or for overseas expeditions or timeshares in holiday homes, these are typically pretty smooth and charming people. So it’s perhaps not a huge leap to see how a persuasive recruiter could be transformed into the Pied Piper of legend.
So that’s the possible historical basis. And of course, Hamelin is an actual town, and if you go there today, apparently they really embrace the legend for the benefit of tourists. You can go and see the ‘Bungelosenstrasse’, the street where no drums are played. Apparently, it’s a local by-law that you’re not allowed to play drums or make music on this street.
Looking at it purely as a legend, Browning’s poem was based on an early 17th-century version of the story, which included the rats. I’ve just read you an excerpt from his longer poem.
So to refresh our memories: the tale begins with the citizens of Hamelin being very distressed and by a rat infestation in their town. And just as the Mayor and the Corporation are debating what on earth they can do about it, the Piper appears. He is wearing pied colours – mixed red and yellow in Browning’s version, obviously very reminiscent of a jester. He promises to rid the town of the rats if they will pay him a thousand guilders. The Mayor says, ‘Well, if you can do that, absolutely, we’d even pay you fifty thousand!’ So, quick as a flash, the Piper goes out into the street and plays his pipe to lure away the rats, in the passage we’ve just heard.
After the rats are gone, he returns for payment. But of course, the Mayor and the Corporation are rather loath to pay up, especially as the rats are all dead. They say, ‘Well, he’s not exactly going to bring them back to life, is he?’ So instead of a thousand guilders, they say, ‘Come, take fifty.’ And the Piper is having none of this. He insists, and threatens consequences if they break their promise:
And folks who put me in a passion
May find me pipe after another fashion.
But the Mayor stupidly replies, ‘Do your worst’. Whereupon the Piper goes out into the street again and starts piping once more. And this time, of course, it’s the children of the town who fall under the spell of his music, who are lured away, and vanish into a hole in the mountainside, along with the Piper.
We get a version of the immigration theory at the end of Browning’s poem, where he says that the children emerged from the mountains into Transylvania, where their ‘outlandish ways and dress’ marked them out as different to the locals.
So that’s the story, and whatever its historical basis, I think it’s pretty clear that the Piper in the legend is an archetypal figure: a trickster, an envoy from the otherworld. A bit like the Green Knight in Gawain and the Green Knight, who appears at King Arthur’s court and challenges the knights to a Christmas game. Or indeed, like the many fairies and witches and other magical beings who appear to humans in fairy stories, extract a promise of some kind, and then take revenge when the humans break their promise.
And Browning does a wonderful job of evoking the strangeness of the Piper, when he introduces him in an earlier part of the poem:
And in did come the strangest figure!
His queer long coat from heel to head
Was half of yellow and half of red;
And he himself was tall and thin,
With sharp blue eyes, each like a pin,
And light loose hair, yet swarthy skin,
No tuft on cheek nor beard on chin,
But lips where smiles went out and in –
There was no guessing his kith and kin!
Another interpretation of the poem sees the Piper as the archetypal artist who, as we know, often has a lot of trouble getting paid. You know, for all the praise, gratitude, and superlatives society likes to shower upon great artists, it’s amazing how often it struggles to pay them enough to eat. One scholar even links the story to Browning’s own sense of grievance over an unpaid invoice. Sometimes the most mundane things can inspire the most magical poetry.
But I don’t think we need to pin down the Piper too narrowly. To me, what makes him such a compelling figure is his strangeness, his unwillingness to fit into the usual categories of common sense and daily life.
And I think we can agree that Browning’s poem is a wonderfully vivid and magical version of the story. It’s characteristic of him in being a very entertaining poem. These days, I think Browning is a little bit overlooked as a poet, certainly in comparison to Tennyson, who is probably our go-to major male Victorian poet. But Browning is a really enjoyable poet to read. He does a lot of storytelling and dramatic monologues, and his poems are very often very entertaining. They are page-turners. It’s a bit of a sad comment on our image of poetry that it’s remarkable when a poet is considered entertaining, but it’s certainly true of Browning.
This was one of the most famous poems in his collection, Dramatic Lyrics. It was published nearly three decades after the Grimm’s Fairy Tales version – the Grimms’ version came out in 1816, Browning’s in 1842. But Browning’s poem has been even more influential than Grimms’ Fairy Tales in popularising the story, at least in the English-speaking world.
And listening to this excerpt, about the trick the Piper plays on the rats, I think we can see why. It is an absolutely entrancing poem, which, of course, is entirely appropriate, given that the subject of the poem is entrancement or enchantment.
Right from the beginning of this passage, and indeed throughout the poem, the rhyme and the rhythm are integral to the poem’s effect. Let’s listen again to the opening lines:
Into the street the Piper stept,
Smiling first a little smile,
As if he knew what magic slept
In his quiet pipe the while;
Then, like a musical adept,
To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled,
And green and blue his sharp eyes twinkled,
Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled;
These lines are characteristic of his method throughout the whole poem. We start with five lines of interlocking rhymes: ‘stept,’ ‘smiled,’ ‘slept,’ ‘while,’ ‘adept.’. And then we have a run of three rhymes together: ‘wrinkled,’ ‘twinkled,’ and ‘sprinkled.’ Not only three rhymes in a row, but three double rhymes, rhyming on two syllables. And the effect is heightened by the fact that the third rhyme is in a line that contains that lovely image of his eyes twinkling like a candle-flame when salt is sprinkled on it.
Even in 1842, this kind of rhyming would have been considered a bit much, over-egging the pudding. I think one way Browning gets away with this is that it’s a children’s fairy story, so maybe adults are more likely to be indulgent of such ‘jingling’ rhymes, to use Milton’s word. Obviously, Milton would have shuddered in horror listening to this poem.
And it’s not just rhyme that creates the trancelike effect – this also comes from the rhythm. Browning’s metre is rather unusual for 19th-century English literary poetry in that it’s not written in syllable stress metre, where there is a relatively fixed pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, like iambic pentameter, which we’ve heard a lot on this podcast, which goes ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM.
‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ is written in stress metre, which means there are a regular number of stresses in a line, but there can be a varying number of syllables. It was relatively rare in literary verse, but it’s a very common metre in traditional ballads, which makes it appropriate for a legend like this.
And Browning is absolutely masterful in the way he can speed up or slow down at different points in the action, for dramatic effect. Most of the lines in this poem have four stresses in the line, but the length of the line can vary a lot, from the very short:
Into the street the Piper stept,
This line has only eight syllables, and we can really feel the Piper stepping slowly and carefully into the street. But a few lines later, when the rats are on the loose, we find these two longer lines, with eleven syllables each:
And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.
So those extra syllables prompt the reader to pick up the pace, almost leaping from stress to stress, like the rats leaping and tumbling into the street.
Another way Browning varies the rhythm is by occasionally using a line with only three stresses. So listening again to the opening four lines:
Into the street the Piper stept,
Smiling first a little smile,
As if he knew what magic slept
In his quiet pipe the while;
The first three lines establish the four-stress rhythm, and then when we get to ‘quiet pipe the while,’ there are only three beats:
In his quiet pipe the while;
And of course, this is the moment when the Piper pauses before he starts to play. So that missing beat creates a wonderful little dramatic pause, before the action gets under way. Then there’s the amazing moment when the rats make their entrance:
And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered,
You heard as if an army muttered;
And the muttering grew to a grumbling;
And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.
Listen again to these two lines: the first one has only three stresses, then the next one has four:
And the muttering grew to a grumbling;
And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;
Can you hear that? Isn’t the way the line grows longer wonderfully mimetic of the sound of the rats growing louder and louder? And of course it’s no coincidence that this is another run of three double rhymes – ‘grumbling’, ‘rumbling’ and ‘tumbling’. Browning is using all the sound effects and technical wizardry at is disposal. And for me, this scene is as good as anything in a Disney movie. It continues with this fantastic description of the rats:
Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,
Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,
Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,
Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,
Families by tens and dozens,
Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives –
Followed the Piper for their lives.
What we’ve got here, of course, is a list, which is a technique that Browning employs repeatedly and very effectively in this poem. As I’ve said before on the podcast, poets love lists – they’re a kind of verbal cornucopia, that allows them to express the abundance and diversity of life. And of course in this case, it’s a mesmerising vision but also a horrifying one, since the multiplication of the rats is precisely what the townsfolk are so keen to avoid.
So we’ve got this amazing description of all the rats tumbling through the streets of the town and into the river:
From street to street he piped advancing,
And step for step they followed dancing,
Until they came to the river Weser
Wherein all plunged and perished
Notice that we’ve got another three-beat line here:
Wherein all plunged and perished
Because this is another dramatic pause, as we contemplate the rats drowning in the river. And then the next line starts with a dash, because the camera’s zooming in on the solitary rat who escapes to tell the tale:
Until they came to the river Weser
Wherein all plunged and perished
– Save one who, stout as Julius Caesar,
Swam across and lived to carry
(As he the manuscript he cherished)
To Rat-land home his commentary,
And in case you were wondering about my pronunciation of the river’s name: in German, of course, it should be ‘VAYzer’, but Browning is obviously rhyming it with ‘Caesar’, and he is clearly not a man for half-rhymes, so I’m going with ‘VEEzer’.
So the rat is taking his ‘commentary’ home to ‘Rat-land’. It’s like the classic battlefield sadism, where an entire army is wiped out, but the victorious general spares one soldier from the carnage, so he can go and tell the folks at home what happened to their loved ones.
And the rat’s commentary opens a magic portal inside what was already a very magical poem. The rat tells us what it was like for the rats to hear the Piper’s music:
‘At the first shrill notes of the pipe,
I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,
And putting apples, wondrous ripe,
Into a cider-press’s gripe:
And a moving away of pickle-tub-boards,
And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards,
And a drawing the corks of train-oil-flasks,
And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks;
What do we find here? Not two, not three, but four full rhymes in a row: ‘pipe,’ ‘tripe’, ‘ripe’ and ‘gripe’. As the magic takes effect, the poetry gets more and more densely woven. In fact the magic is so strong, the lines start rhyming at both ends, because we have four lines starting with the same syntactic pattern: ‘And a moving…’ ‘And a leaving…’ ‘And a drawing…’ ‘And a breaking…’
And this is another delightful list. It’s also a really wonderful imaginative leap that Browning takes, showing us what the rats must always be focusing on: they’re listening out for sounds of food being left out, of doors being left ajar, of flasks being uncorked, of apples being squeezed in a cider press. It’s a sign of a great storyteller, a really imaginative writer, to be able to enter into the consciousness of a rat in this way, its ‘interiority’, as the scholars would say.
And then we get, another magic portal inside the magic portal of the rat’s consciousness, as we hear the imagined voice of the rat describing the imagined voice he hears in the piper’s music:
And it seemed as if a voice
(Sweeter than by harp or by psaltery
Is breathed) called out, Oh rats, rejoice!
The world is grown to one vast drysaltery!
So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!
And just as one bulky sugar-puncheon,
Ready staved, like a great sun shone
Glorious scarce an inch before me,
Just as methought it said, Come, bore me!
— I found the Weser rolling o’er me.’
Notice that this section begins with another three-stress line – And it seemed as if a voice – which creates another dramatic pause before the rats’ final frenzy of hunger. And the fact we’re now listening to the imagined voice of the music described by the imagined voice of the rat inside the imaginary world of the story means we’re are several layers deep in imagined realities.
I’ve talked about the technique of nested story loops before, in Episode 76 about Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’, and about the hypnotic effect they have on a reader or listener, which I know about from my days as a hypnotherapist. So Browning has taken us really deep down the rabbit hole – or rather the rat hole!
And as we reach the climax of the sequence about the rats, not only does the rhythm speed up and the syntax get shorter and choppier; not only do we get ‘psaltery’ and ‘drysaltery’ rhyming on three syllables, which is borderline absurd; not only do we get the internal rhymes, rhymes within the line, of ‘munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,’; but we also get a run of four rhyming lines in a row, with every rhyme a full double rhyme, rhyming on two syllables:
So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!
And just as one bulky sugar-puncheon,
Ready staved, like a great sun shone
And the effect of this verse is intoxicating for us as readers and listeners, just as the rat is intoxicated by its feverish hunger. And it’s at this moment of orgiastic frenzy, when the rat seems to hear a barrel, a puncheon, inviting it to bore through it with his teeth, that he teeters over the brink and into the river:
And just as one bulky sugar-puncheon,
Ready staved, like a great sun shone
Glorious scarce an inch before me,
Just as methought it said, Come, bore me!
– I found the Weser rolling o’er me.’
And that was the end of all the rats but this one, who survived to tell the tale.
And then the poem goes on with the villagers ringing the town bells with joy, and then the argument between the Mayor and the Piper, and of course, the Piper taking his terrifying revenge.
Here is the rest of the poem, do go and read it all. Because the description of the Piper spiriting away the children is just as vivid and entrancing as the sequence with the rats, but it’s also heartbreaking, because none of us really worry about the rats, however much we hear about their interiority. But of course, none of us would want the children to be spirited away.
And by the time it ends, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ is a really haunting poem. Like any good folktale or fairy tale, it mixes darkness and light. It begins with the shining, jingling rhymes, the fun, the vividness of the storytelling, and yet it leaves us, just like the Piper’s music, in a very pensive state.
We don’t feel the grief of the townsfolk as fully as they do, but I do think we are left with the feeling, ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I’. There’s something deeply troubling about this poem, a sense that those of us living in civilised comfort can be challenged by a voice or a figure or a melody, a piece of art that comes from the otherworld, that speaks of magical, mysterious things. And we can be challenged by this, with a sense that our comforts are bought a little too cheaply, and there may be a payback we don’t anticipate.
I also think there’s a part of us that wants to hear the sound of that music, and that maybe longs to answer the call, to be spirited away in search of something we’re missing, in spite of everything we leave behind.
OK let’s have another listen to the Piper enticing the rats away. And I for one will be listening to this with envy as well as pleasure, because if I’m honest this is a poem that I really wish I’d written myself. I’m really in awe of Browning’s skill, and I doff my cap to the poet as well as the Piper.
From ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’
Into the street the Piper stept,
Smiling first a little smile,
As if he knew what magic slept
In his quiet pipe the while;
Then, like a musical adept,
To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled,
And green and blue his sharp eyes twinkled,
Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled;
And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered,
You heard as if an army muttered;
And the muttering grew to a grumbling;
And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.
Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,
Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,
Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,
Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,
Families by tens and dozens,
Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives –
Followed the Piper for their lives.
From street to street he piped advancing,
And step for step they followed dancing,
Until they came to the river Weser
Wherein all plunged and perished
– Save one who, stout as Julius Caesar,
Swam across and lived to carry
(As he the manuscript he cherished)
To Rat-land home his commentary,
Which was, ‘At the first shrill notes of the pipe,
I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,
And putting apples, wondrous ripe,
Into a cider-press’s gripe:
And a moving away of pickle-tub-boards,
And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards,
And a drawing the corks of train-oil-flasks,
And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks;
And it seemed as if a voice
(Sweeter than by harp or by psaltery
Is breathed) called out, Oh rats, rejoice!
The world is grown to one vast drysaltery!
So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!
And just as one bulky sugar-puncheon,
Ready staved, like a great sun shone
Glorious scarce an inch before me,
Just as methought it said, Come, bore me!
– I found the Weser rolling o’er me.’
Robert Browning
Robert Browning was an English poet who was born in 1812 and died in 1899. His early works were met with mixed reviews, but he later achieved critical acclaim with collections like Men and Women and Dramatis Personae. Hew as renowned for his mastery of dramatic monologue and psychological insight. He was married to the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, forming one of literature’s most celebrated partnerships. When he died in Venice, his body was returned to England where he was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
A Mouthful of Air – the podcast
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