Wednesday, 17 October 2012

Pied Piper of Hamelin

The poem is about a little town plagued by rats and then they have a turn of fortune with the pied piper but the government try to cheat him so the pied piper ends up taking the kids away.
In the beginning of Brownings Pied piper of hamelin poem he starts by setting the scene with the location and time of where the story is set instead of describing it it just gives the facts of where it is.The first stanza does have some rhyming involved but it mainly kicks off in the second stanza of the poem. Browning starts the second stanza with a minor sentence to make it bold and stand out "Rats!" he uses this to make a statement that emphasizes how much of a nuisance they are. He goes on to describe the disturbances they're causing in the town and to emphasize further how irritating they are he repeats "and" at the beginning of his sentences. In this second stanza the endings all have another ending elsewhere to rhyme with and in lines 18-19 4 verbs are used to create a rhyme within a rhyme with the repetition of the "ing" sound he also involves enjambment within it too, possibly to emphasize how they don't stop.
The third stanza the narrative tone seems to be mocking at the mayor and corporations as they seem to be incompetent
"for dolts that can't or won't determine
what's best to rid us of our vermine!
"
The fact that Browning decided to exclaim it can show the anger of this person telling the story.
 In the fifth stanza, where the piper is introduced, there is a lot of imagery when it comes to talking about the piper;
"his queer long coat from heel to head
was half of yellow and half of red,
and he himself was tall and thin...."
There are about 10 lines on describing how he looked and peoples reactions to him, almost the whole stanza is describing him. I think Browning does this to show how different he is in comparison to what would be considered normal and to also show how the people of the town are keeping a close eye on him as he is new around and they wouldn't want any trouble.

I think browning made the poem on purpose so that we could learn the moral which is graspable from the end which would be to not cheat someone and lie.

1 comment:

  1. You pick out several narrative features. Now explain how they relate to the moral and try to develop their effectiveness a bit more.

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