"The Pied Piper of Hamelin" begins with a little scene-setting. This poem, the narrator informs us, takes place in the German town of Hamelin, on the banks of the river Weser (pronounced somewhere between "Veeser" and "Weeser"). It's a charming place with old stone walls; "a pleasanter spot you never spied," the narrator says. But "almost five hundred years ago," it wasn't so pleasant at all: back then, Hamelin suffered from a terrible plague of "vermin."
All these details might ring a bell for readers who know their folklore. This poem will retell the old story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the magical musician who rid a medieval town of its rat infestation.
As the poem's inscription reveals, this poem was written for one "W.M. the Younger"—that is, Willy Macready, the young son of Robert Browning's friend William Macready. Browning wrote this poem to entertain Willy while the boy was stuck in bed recovering from an illness. Just like a good uncle telling a bedtime story, the poem's narrator speaks in an engaging, personable voice.
That sparky voice rests on the poem's accentual meter. Rather than using any particular pattern of metrical feet (like iambs or trochees), the poem measures lines in beats. Listen to the rhythm of the first few lines of the poem, for example:
Hamelin Town's in Brunswick,
By famous Hanover city;
The river Weser, deep and wide,
Washes its wall on the southern side;
A pleasanter spot you never spied;
The poem hops between lines with three beats and lines with four, scattering those beats wherever it likes within the lines to create a pattering, chatty rhythm.
The rhymes are just as lively. Rather than keeping to a set rhyme scheme here, Browning throws rhymes around for dramatic effect, sometimes stringing as many as six rhyming lines together.
Notice all the musical alliteration in these first lines, too:
Hamelin Town's in Brunswick,
By famous Hanover city;
The river Weser, deep and wide,
Washes its wall on the southern side;
A pleasanter spot you never spied;
All those jaunty matching sounds make the poem sound a little bit magical, different from ordinary speech: this is a storyteller's voice.
In its sounds, its rhythms, and its language alike, this will be a playful poem, a distracting treat for a bored kid. But it will also offer some sly social commentary, winking at adult readers with its remarks on greed, shortsighted conventionality, and just how hard it is for an artist to get paid what he's owed.