An evaluation on 50 lines of Robert Browning's "The Pied Piper of Hamelin"

The fifty lines that I have chosen to evaluate are lines 205 to 255, from the end of stanza twelve to the end of stanza thirteen.

In the very first line of this extract, there is an example of a language feature, a Simile. The children who the Pied Piper is leading away have "teeth like pearls". Browning uses the word "pearls" because pearls are shiny and white, like the children's teeth. Adult's teeth in 1376 (the year in which the poem is set) would have been all manky and rotten and falling out because they hadn't invented toothpaste or false teeth yet! Whiteness was also a symbol of how rich you were, because if you had to work outside everyday on the land, then you would have been sunburned and crispy, but if you could afford to stay indoors all day while your servants did your housework for you, then you would have been whiter than white.

All the way through the poem (including my extract) Browning uses a rhyming scheme and, although it doesn't seem to follow any set pattern (e.g. AABBAA or ABAB) this creates a general atmosphere of a jaunty tale for children, as all poems for children have a rhyme to keep them interested. As an interesting side note to this, the sub-title of the poem is "A child's story", although whether this is because of the story's child friendly rhyming or because it's about the Pied Piper stealing all of the children is unclear. Another feature of this poem is it's clear splitting into stanzas. This could be argued to support the child friendly argument about this poem, because if everything is in one long block of text without stanzas, like Porphyrias lover, people tend to lose interest and which type of people have the shortest attention spans? Why, children, natrualy. These stanzas are also numbered like chapters in a book so the hypothetical child reading the story (or, to be fair, anyone) would know where to start reading the story again after having left it because they have short attention spans.

Line 214 contains another language feature, this time a metaphore. The line says that the Mayor was "on the rack". The Mayor was not litterally "on the rack", but by using a familiar term like "on the rack", Browning makes the tone of the poem more informal than, say, The Patriot or The Laboratory, and thus, more child friendly. I believe that this technique works because, well, have you ever tried reading up on Kantian ethics? Dull as ditchwater! If only they'd throw in some familiar phrases (like "dull as ditchwater") maybe i'd find RS easier, because I could relate to it, like I can relate to this poem!

As my last point, I would like to say that, at the start of lines 220, 221, 225, 229 ect., a grand total of 17 times in my extract, lines are started with the word "and". This would be to move the poem on at a very rapid pace when a person is reading it aloud, as you might to a child. The "ands" also serve as discourse markers, rather than simply just connectives because they are used so often, it's almost like saying "like" after everything you say, like. People in general tend to use discourse markers all the time in speach, which backs up my point of the informality of the poem. From line 246 through to 249, the "lame" boy's description is particularly full of these "ands", as the boy is presumably fondly remembering what the Piper told him and his "playmates" about what the reader could interpret to be heaven. The "ands" are also written here to show how often the boy has told his story, as the "ands" make it flow quickly.