The Pied Piper of Hamelin is cleverly narrated using
different characters’ stories, adding to the continual theme of the poem being
portrayed as ‘village gossip’ and a mixed view of different people’s tales to
create a remembered fictional story. Throughout the first 50 lines, it changes
narrators quite frequently to keep the story flowing and set the scene. It
starts off with an ‘ABABCAACCA’ pattern, alternating throughout the next
stanzas; adding to the feeling of re-telling and piecing the parts of the story
together, reflected by the nature of the town and its constituents- ‘the
townsfolk’.
The reader receives a strong sense of community from
‘Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick’ from the first few stanzas, because the people
join to a ‘body’ and solve the problem at hand. The rats are described in the
second stanza; from the perspective of the annoyed people who want the problem
solved. This is obvious due to the random sentences and the punctuation used at
the end of lines, as if they were each quotes from different people.
The third stanza goes on to describe the mess that has been
formed due to the rats, and how best go about clearing it up. ‘What’s best to
rid us of our vermin!’- portrays the mutual feeling of discontent over the
rats, and they decide to blame the person in power- ‘our mayor’s a noddy’. This
is because they doubt his instincts and believe that the current situation is a
result of poor leadership, linking to our modern society.
The fourth stanza up to line 55; is told from the point of
view of the mayor. After a long ‘silence’ he decides the best thing to say at
the time is that he wished he were ‘a mile hence’- highlighting his lack of
authority and knowledge- giving the people more of the right to blame the mayor
when the situation becomes even more out of hand further into the poem. The
stanza ends with a critical few lines ‘sounding like a rat’- with ‘pit-a-pat’,
‘tap’ and the repetition of the word ‘trap’. This is soon followed by the
entrance of the Pied Piper- showing his importance after this build-up, and
‘trap’ emphasizes the theory that the Pied Piper could have been an act all
along- and knew that he would seek revenge in this way before he even entered
with a ‘scraping’ of shoes on the mat.
