I keep thinking I ought to start learning poems again as I did when I was a child. Not for any particular reason, I just think I used to enjoy it, would no doubt enjoy it again, and I guess as I get older and lead a quieter life as I no longer to to school or to work (which for many years was the same thing!) maybe my brain might be getting rusty.
I used to be able to recite reams of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ written in 1842 by Robert Browning, and even now i keep trotting out odd verses. I’m not sure I ever knew all of it as it’s 51 stanzas of six lines! The story of course is much older, the story of a small town overrun by rats,
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats.
And licked the soup from the cook’s own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats,
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.
Browning, who was born in 1812, was not the first poet to tell the tale in verse, but there seems no clear factual evidence for the two aspects of the story. Hamelin suffering a plague of rats, maybe in the twelfth or thirteenth century, and a mysterious figure enticing not only the rats but the children of the town away from their homes. There are various plaques commemorating children being led away, and one – no doubt where Browning got his inspiration from, dated 1642 recounts:
A.D. 1284 – on the 26th of June – the day of St. John and St. Paul – 130 children – born in Hamelin were led out of the town by a piper wearing multicoloured clothes. After passing the Calvary near the Koppenberg they disappeared forever.
Whatever the truth of it, there is a horrible modern resonance in eastern Europe where Ukrainian children have been kidnapped during the current conflict on the countries’ eastern borders.
Lois Elsden 