The Pied Piper of Hamelin

“The Pied Piper of Hamelin” begins by establishing its geographic and temporal setting: The story takes place “[a]lmost five hundred years ago” (Line 7) in “Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick, / [b]y famous Hanover city” (Lines 1-2). These elements ground the reader, cementing the world of the story and supporting the plot elements that arise in later stanzas. The first stanza also directly alludes to the speaker, using the word “my” (Line 6); the speaker will appear again at the end of the poem.

The second stanza bluntly and succinctly summarizes the town’s problem: “Rats!” (Line 10). Placing this single syllable on its own line—the only one-word line in the poem—clearly marks the pests as the key driving force of the entire story. The stanza vividly illustrates the conflict manifesting in the town: Rats nibble on babies and upset daily gossip.

The third stanza introduces the town’s governing structures, which will feature heavily in the narrative. We meet the “Mayor” and learn about the “Corporation,” or the political party in control. This abstract word gives the story a sinister, dystopian feel and foreshadows the social divides that will ultimately lead to the town’s undoing. In this section, the poem alludes to the ruling class’s wealth and privilege.

Despite giving his name to the poem’s title, the Pied Piper doesn’t appear until the fifth stanza, more than 50 lines into the poem. The speaker uses stark juxtaposition to contrast the Piper with the more conventional townspeople and to portray him as an outsider. His hair is light in color, but his skin is “swarthy” (Line 55), meaning that he has spent a lot of time traveling in hot sun. The man is of unknown origin: “There was no guessing his kith and kin” (Line 58). In other words, he is like no one the townspeople of Hamelin have ever seen before. Like a traveling entertainer, tinker, or merchant, the Pied Piper advertises his services: He shares his various victories over the vermin of far-off kingdoms. In this way, the Piper combines the professions of musician, storyteller, and magical exterminator.

The seventh stanza is the longest in the poem, and its rhythm mimics the rhythm of the song taking place within it. As the Piper plays his enticing tune, the lines “[a]nd the muttering grew to a grumbling; / [a]nd the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling” (Lines 102-103) begin like a slow overture. The lines describing the running rodents mimic the pace of their movements with a string of monosyllabic and repeating words: “Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, / Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats” (Lines 105-106). The entire stanza reads like the rise and fall of musical notes, which bleeds into the celebration of the eighth stanza.

However, in the eighth stanza, the town’s moment of triumph ends with the re-entrance of the Piper, who demands his very high payment: “First, if you please, my thousand guilders!” (Line 148). This halt in musicality reflects the halt in the celebrations as the town’s political leaders are suddenly faced with a new challenge—the payment they’ve offered the Piper suddenly seems too high. After the descriptive passages of the preceding stanzas, these ones create a shift in tone by being mostly dialogue. The mayor first tries to appeal to the Piper, then resorts to anger and threats. This marks the midway turning point of the poem.

The Piper reveals his true power by taking away the town’s children while rendering adult onlookers immobile so they can do nothing to stop him. In this scene, the poem reincorporates its earlier device of using rhythm to mimic music and movement. The children’s steps follow the Piper to create a building crescendo: “Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering, / Little hands clapping, and little tongues chattering” (Lines 193-194)—lines that mirror the earlier scene of rats following the piper with “grumbling” and “rumbling” (Lines 103-104). By using similar structure, the poet heightens the parallel between these two moments. Moreover, the poem suggests that the Piper plans to drown the children as he did the rats: “the Piper turned from the High Street / where the Weser rolled its waters / [r]ight in the way of their sons and daughters” (Lines 210-212). The view of the fast-flowing Weser River heightens the terror readers imagine in the minds of Hamelin’s frozen parents, helplessly watching their children being led away.

The Piper offers to the children a place without any sickness and in which everything is filled with life and color. Like the sole surviving rat, a boy with a physical disability is left behind. Both rat and forgotten child are given the task of sharing the story with others so that the children’s memory, and the urban legend of the Pied Piper, can live on. However, while the child stays in Hamelin and grows melancholy imagining the other children in some far-off place—his fate is the opposite of the happy ending given to the rat that gets to return to his “Rat-land home” (Line 120).

The speaker implies that the children found a new home in a new country (in present-day Romania, which is quite far from Hamelin)—a deviation from the original fairy tale, which concludes that the Piper has taken the children to fairyland or Christian heaven. The final stanzas summarize lessons for listeners: the dangers of avarice and the value of keeping one’s word. In the closing lines, the speaker returns to the first-person perspective and frames the internal narrative with a classic fairy tale moral. Morals in children’s stories were very popular at this time, and this likely contributed to how often the poem was revisited and retold across generations.