A collection of poetry. I read it because I’m working my way through the rest of the Racine list again. I certainly didn’t want to read all of Browning’s poetry, so I picked what looked like a manageable bit. None of the poems moved me, and it was only rarely that I cared enough to even really know what was going on. I don’t like the way he keeps changing his rhythm or his staggered rhyme schemes. The only poem in this collection I’d heard of before was The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and I guess I’d give that individual poem a 6.

It was about Hamelin, a town in Germany that had a problem with rats. A piper showed up one day in bright red and yellow clothes and agreed to rid the town of the pests for a thousand guilders. He started playing his pipe, and all the rats in the town came out and followed him to the river where they all drowned, except for one who made it to the other side and told the tale of what the piper’s music felt like.

Once the rats were dead, the Mayor decided he didn’t need to pay the piper the exorbitant fee. He offered 50 guilders instead. The piper started playing and all the children of the town came out to follow. He led them into a doorway that opened in the mountain and they were never heard from again, except for one lame boy who couldn’t keep up and who described what the music seemed to promise. The townsfolk tried to find the piper but never could. But there is a tribe of people in Transylvania who claim their parents came out of a mountain a long time back from the town of Hamelin.