The Pied Piper of Hamelin

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Thereupon he walked through all the town's streets with a pipe, which he put to his mouth and blew upon. Immediately all the rats in the entire town came from all the houses and followed at his feet in unbelievable numbers to the outskirts of the town. He banished them into the nearst sacred mountain, and from then onward there was no sign of the rats in the town.

Red Cotton Night-Cap Country; or, Turf and Towers(London: Smith, Elder, 1873; Boston: Osgood, 1873).Pearsall, "Robert Browning," New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). Soon afterward both parties agreed upon a certain reward. Thereupon the magician took a little demon from his bag, with whom he performed all kinds of hocus pocus. Then he took out a little book from which he read a number of incomprehensible charms. Finally he commanded all the rats and mice to gather around him. The occasion now why this matter came unto my remembrance in speaking of Translvania, was, for that some do report that there are divers found among the Saxons in Translvania that have like surnames unto divers of the Burgers of Hamel, and will therby seeme to inferre, that this Jugler or pide Piper, might by negromancy have transported them thither, but this carrieth litle appearence of truth; because it would have beene almost as great a wonder unto the Saxon of Transilvania to have had so many strange children brought among them, they knew not how, as it was to those of Hamel to lose them: and they could not but have kept memorie of so strange a thing, if indeed any such thing had there hapned.

Source (books.google.com): Emil Sommer, "Die Kinder von Erfurt," Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Sachsen und Thüringen (Halle: Eduard Anton, 1846), no. 68, p. 79.The said Town of Hamelen was annoyed with Rats and Mice; and it chanc'd, that a Pied-coated Piper came thither, who covenanted with the chief Burgers for such a reward, if he could free them quite from the said Vermin, nor would he demand it, till a twelve-month, and a day after: The agreement being made, he began to play on his Pipes, and all the Rats, and the Mice followed him to a great Lough hard by, where they all perish'd; so the Town was infected no more. Onomatopoeia: It is the use of words whose sounds imitate their meanings. An example of onomatopoeia can be found in lines 19-20: “With shrieking and squeaking / In fifty different sharps and flats.”

Bells and Pomegranates. No. III.--Dramatic Lyrics(London: Moxon, 1842); edited by J. O. Beatty and J. W. Bowyer (New York: Houghton, 1895).

Summary

Besides introducing the world to “The Pied Piper” and establishing the poet’s modus operandi for his future verse, Dramatic Lyricsalso had a lasting effect on Browning’s personal life. Elizabeth Barrett admired the book, and in her 1844 poem “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” she expressed the esteem in which she held Browning by linking him to William Wordsworth and Alfred, Lord Tennyson as one of the great poets of the age. She met Browning and the two poets fell deeply in love, but Elizabeth’s father, Edward Moulton Barrett, would not countenance any of his children marrying and leaving the home. On September 12, 1846 they were secretly married, and one week later they eloped to the Continent. Browning was born on May 7, 1812 in Camberwell, a middle-class suburb of London. He was the only son of Robert Browning, a clerk in the Bank of England, and a devoutly religious German-Scotch mother, Sarah Anna Wiedemann Browning. He had a sister, Sarianna, who like her parents was devoted to Browning. While Mrs. Browning’s piety and love of music are frequently cited as important influences on the poet’s development, his father’s scholarly interests and unusual educational practices may have been equally significant. The son of a wealthy banker, Robert Browning the elder had been sent in his youth to make his fortune in the West Indies, but he found the slave economy there so distasteful that he returned, hoping for a career in art and scholarship. A quarrel with his father and the financial necessity it entailed led the elder Browning to relinquish his dreams so as to support himself and his family through his bank clerkship. Equally fast the yellow dwarf raised his fife, and mice by the millions followed its sound. They all advanced to Tannenberg Mountain, which opened up, and when it closed again, there was no trace of either the dwarf or the mice. Whatever its sources, “The Pied Piper” reflects the hand of a master storyteller. The poem tells a story of civic venality and retribution. Desperate to rid the city of rats, the corrupt and repulsively corpulent mayor engages the mysterious piper to charm the vermin away; the piper plays a tune that draws the rats from their holes and leads them to the river Weser, where they drown. Only one especially hardy rat escapes death—by swimming across the river—to tell a cautionary tale to other rats; the rat’s story enables Browning to provide an explanation for the piper’s magic, as the rat tells how the sound of the pipe evoked all kinds of wonderful treats for rats: urn:lcp:piedpiperofhamel0000brow:epub:a71d5276-6d97-407d-bc67-10897dbadbd0 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier piedpiperofhamel0000brow Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t33281j39 Invoice 1652 Isbn 0688038093