The Pied Piper of Hamelin is one of those stories I’ve known for
longer than I can remember. I’ve encountered the tale in various forms,
found it referenced in L. M. Montgomery’s later Anne of Green Gables books and been enchanted by The Minstrel of Cranberry Lane,
an Irish Rovers song that treads similar ground despite the lack of
rats to start things off. But I’d never read the famous version of the
story by poet Robert Browning, and recently I decided to correct that
after encountering the title in 1001 Children’s Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up, a book that has given me a very long list of items to put on hold at the library.
I’ve always thought of The Pied Piper
as a primarily sad story, especially for the parents who are left in a
town devoid of children. It’s never entirely clear what happens to the
youngsters who prance away after the merry sound of piping, but there is
at least the possibility that they find themselves in a lovely land
hidden from outsiders, as Kate Greenaway’s cover to this edition
suggests. While portions of the poem are certainly tragic, Browning also
emphasizes the humor of the events that lead up to the fateful
disappearance of Hamelin’s children. His is a tale that often made me
laugh out loud at his witty turns of phrase.
Browning presents
his tale in 15 parts of unequal length. The first section consists of
nine lines and is printed on the first page, while the second contains
11 lines and stretches across six pages, which accentuates the absurdity
of the rats’ hold on this town. On one page a mother comforts her
infant, who has been bitten by a rampaging rat; in another, a woman
holds up a cheese upon which a rat has been snacking. These rodents
“made nests inside men’s Sunday hats / And even spoiled the women’s
chats / By drowning their speaking / With shrieking and squeaking / In
fifty different sharps and flats.”
Just as amusing as the
description of the rats is the depiction of the town council, a corrupt
and ineffective bunch of buffoons who don’t know how to stop the
infestation and who prove themselves woefully unethical when a solution
to their problem manifests itself. The Mayor gets this unflattering
portrait: “With the Corporation as he sat, / Looking little though
wondrous fat; / Nor brighter was his eye, nor moister / Than a
too-long-opened oyster, / Save when at noon his paunch grew mutinous /
For a plate of turtle green and glutinous”. This isn’t a man we’re
primed to like, and by the time the Piper comes along, his offer of an
effective solution is so welcome, it’s hard to see him as a villain
rather than a hero. And indeed, he comes across as humble and
hard-working, asking a reasonable sum for his services and merely
expecting that the Mayor will make good on the agreement when the job is
done. Alas, he expects too much.
Browning offers a detail in
his version I don’t recall hearing before - the testimony of a lone rat
who survives the hypnotic effect of the Piper’s music and manages not to
drown in the river that sweeps the rest of them away. The survivor
rhapsodizes wistfully about the symphony of food-related sounds that
tinkled in his ears when the Piper began to play: “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...”
So it is that we are left with two very distinct possibilities for what
happens to the children whom the Piper, enraged by the mayor’s decision
to pay him a pittance instead of the promised fee, lures from their
homes with his music. Perhaps he draws them away into an idyllic
wonderland such as that described by the lame little boy who is left
standing alone, gazing morosely at the mountain as it swallows up every
other child in the village. Or perhaps his vision is every bit the
deceptive delusion the rats experience. Browning seems to suggest some
combination of the two - that the children are led away not to doom but
to grim captivity from which they manage to escape, though never to
return to their own hometown.
Browning’s poem is pensive but
playful and most artfully written, and Greenaway’s illustrations, while
old-fashioned, are lively and full of personality. Particularly striking
is the series of pages in which she illustrated, line by line, the
twelfth section, during which the Piper uses his mysterious musical gift
to draw away Hamelin’s children. Over the course of 17 pages, we see
individuals and groups of children stop what they are doing and join the
ever-growing throng, which stretches across two pages by the end of the
section.
It’s a rather lengthy read at 47 pages, with many
pages entirely filled with text, and as it was written in the 1800s,
some of the words are likely to be unfamiliar to young readers.
Additionally, those who are especially sensitive may be troubled by the
darker elements of the story, including the mass extermination of the
rats, despite its convenience to the townspeople. But this is an
expertly written piece of literature, and it carries with it the
important message that promises are not to be given lightly. If you
haven’t encountered the Browning / Greenaway version of this
centuries-old story, consider making a promise to yourself to read The Pied Piper of Hamelin - and then be sure you keep it!
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