On_the_Pursuit_of_Verbal_Clues_in_the_Bo (5).docx

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IN PURSUIT OF VERBAL CLUES DETECTED IN
THE BODY OF LITERATURE
By Julian Scutts
Copyright Julian Scutts 2017
ISBN 9781365 896569

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CONTENTS
On Reasons Why Verbal Clues Point to the Implicit Allegorical Structures
that Informand IntegrateWorks of Literature. Page 3
On the Way Isolated Words Pointto the Allegorical Profundities of Richard
the Third, Macbeth, “I wandered Lonely as a Cloud” and “The Pied Piper of
Hamelin” by Robert Browning Page 18
Secrets of the Word “Wanderer” in Goethe’s Poetry Page 55
What Are We Waiting For? Another Look at Samuel Beckett’s Most Famous
Play Page 79

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On Reasons Why Verbal Clues Point to the Implicit
Allegorical Structures that Inform and Integrate
Works of Literature
Is the Allegory an antiquated and artificial form of literary device?
An affirmation of the relevance of Dante’s hermeneutic approach
to the text
When Israelwent outfrom Egyptthe house of Jacob from a people of
strange language Judea wasmade his sanctuary and Israelhis
dominion.” (King JamesVersion). Psalm 114, 1-2
According to the hermeneutic principles laid down by Dante in his “Letter
to Can Grande della Scala” the text cited above referring to the exodus
from Egypt 1 bears interpretation at four levels, the literal, the allegorical,
the moral and the anagogical. These refer respectively to the plain story,
the religious truth underlying the plain story, the conversion of the believer
and the parting of the body and soul at death. Dante’s mode of
interpretation finds precedents in those of Aquinas and in rabbinic
traditions. In effect he broadened the strict principles of scriptural exegesis
so as to render them applicable to the interpretation of any text or piece of
writing. Indeed, Northrop Frye, a leading theorist in literary criticism,
employed the term anagogical as one of his main stays in support of his
arguments throughouthis seminal book Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays,
having borrowed the term from Dante in order to elucidate his contention
that all works of literature and the words that compose them constitute an
all-transcendentunity. Borrowing a term from Dante, flattering as this may
be to the great Italian, is one thing; applying it in the sense specified by
Dante is another, but let us leave this question in abeyance for a moment.

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By and large modern criticism does not pay much regard to the allegory as
a literary device or dwell on its relevance to textual criticism. In close
connection to this low regard for the value of the allegory is a surprising
lack of interest in the word Wanderer and all forms derived from the
common root of verbs to wander and wandern. Such words gained great
prominence in Goethe’s literary works and in those of German and English
Romantic poets, a fact that reflects the power of these words to evoke
allegorical treatments of Cain, the Wandering Jew, the pilgrimage through
life and the guidance of the Spirit. Nonetheless, sometimes one finds a
grudging admission that the allegory is not dead in today’s world after all.
Let us consider such a case.
John Frederick Nims, as the author of a student’s manual on the basics of
poetics implies that allegories arisespontaneously when static symbols are
joined together in a story, and stories arise as soon as a verb of motion has
a role to play, for he writes in Western Wind, a handbook for students of
poetry:
"A mountain may be a symbol of salvation, a traveller may be a
symbol of a human being in his life. But it the traveller takes as much
as one step toward the mountain, it seems that the traveller and the
mountain become allegorical figures, because a story has begun." 1
From this statement we may derive two important conclusions.
First, a story, especially one about an excursion or a journey,
spontaneously generates an allegory irrespective of the author's purposes
or power of prediction. thus the resultant story cannot be the sole product
of the powers of the conscious mind, even in the case of the most
meticulous poet, who is sometimes likened to a craftsman. The element of
1 John Frederick Nims, Western Wind / an Introduction to Poetry (New York, 1983).

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spontaneity and unpredictability of the story belies the alleged artificiality
imputed to allegories in general. What is this controlling or guiding
influence that operates beyond the scope of deliberation and concentrated
thought? For Aquinas and Dante it was the Holy Spirit, for John Milton the
Holy Muse of Horeb, a conflation of biblical and Classical traditions, and for
Goethe, who pioneered exploration of the Unconscious, the libido ever
seeking union with the anima, the Eternal-Feminine.
Second, a story that describes a journey generates an overall sustained
metaphor in this journey or concept of a journey. Evidently a poem is not a
journey in any literal sense and yet the journey and the work share
fundamental affinities, above all in the respective mentality of a poet,
especially at the outset of writing a long poem, and one about to begin a
long and perhaps perilous journey. With this parallel in mind, John Keats
wrote of his “uncertain path” when faced with the prospect of composing
Endymion. Furthermore, a journey referred to in poetry, sermons and even
common speech is a metaphor for the course of human life. Indeed, it is a
special kind of metaphor, a synecdoche, a part of what it symbolizes. For a
journey is a segment of life and often one of the greatest importance in
determining the path of an individual’s life history, the entire course of
which is often likened to a pilgrimage. As a natural consequence of these
relationships a work conceived as an allegory such as The Pilgrim's Progress
incorporates autobiographical elements through the intrusion of many
recollections of personal experience, leading some to identify Hill Difficulty
with a very real place in Bunyan's home environment.
Dante referred the term allegory notonly to the hidden senseof a story but
to the aggregate of all three non-literal planes of significance. These enfold
the moral level of allegory that, in the original concept of Dante, concerns
the personal striving of the believer that follows conversion, as exemplified
pre-eminently by the content and substance of The Pilgrim's Progress. In
the course of 18th century writers became less concerned with the

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specifically religious question of conversion and the contentions with the
flesh than with the processes of poetic and artistic creativity, which led to
great anguish and tension in the life and experience of creative artists and
writers. Perhaps one of the earliest cases in which a writer was conscious
of a new sense of allegory in an increasingly secular world was Daniel
Defoe, who attributed to Crusoethe editor of his work a new sense of what
the allegory meant in the eighteenth century.
As the "editor" of the second version of Robinson Crusoe (1720) Crusoe
remarks (I place in bold print words that appear especially significant:
the story, although allegorical, is also historical… In a word, the
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe are one whole scheme of a real life
of eight and twenty years, spent in the most wandering desolate and
afflicting circumstances that ever man went through.
Three words in this citation are of particular interest from the point of view
taken in this study. As "history," Crusoe's story describes in plausibly
realistic terms the experience of a man who was forced to survive almost
thirty years of isolation from European civilization, but what is the
"allegorical" character of the story? Perhaps a scrutiny of particular words
in the text of Defoe’s novel can help us here?
The word "wandering" acquires a negative tone by its juxtaposition with
"desolate" and "afflicting." The negative connotations of the word suggest
disorientation and a punishment for sin or folly. The uncertainties
surrounding these references to "allegory" and "wandering" may be
clarified if we inspect occurrences of the verb to wander in the story itself.

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In the opening paragraphs of Robinson Crusoe 2
the verbs to ramble and
to wander are associated with "thought" and "inclination" in a manner that
is fully consistent with common usage. The third paragraph opens with the
words: "Being the third son of the family and not bred to a trade, my head
began to be filled very early with rambling thoughts." The fourth paragraph
contains a sentence in which Crusoe states that he had no reason other
than "a mere wandering inclination" for leaving his native country.
Although any verb of motion may acquire a metaphorical meaning in
whatever form of language, some have become linked by usage with such
notions as digression, deviation, transgression and so on. To ramble does
not conventionally imply a moral judgment. When referring to thought or
speech, it suggests that one or the other of these is logically disconnected
or lacking in purposefuldirection. The connotative range of to wander finds
no parallel in other verbs of motion such as to ramble, to stray, to digress,
to transgress, to roam, etc. The juxtaposition of "wandering inclination"
and "leaving my father's house" obviously recalls the strong biblical
associations of the word to wander with the wilderness journey of the
Israelites, the parable of the Prodigal Son and other well-known motifs. A
reference to "father's house" recurs in the story, pointing to the central
significance of the figure of the Prodigal Son. In one way this is strange, as
Crusoe returns to England long after his parents' death. If we take Crusoe's
father to be a figure representing the patriarchal order of established
society rather than Crusoe's progenitor, the reason for Crusoe's being
likened to the Prodigal Son becomes understandable. Cut off from the
civilization of his native land, Crusoe must establish a new social order
based - let us say - on the Protestant work ethic. Certainly the novel's social
and political implications were immediately grasped by the reading public
in England and on the continent of Europe, and those writers who were
2 The original full title is: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all
alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of
the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck,
wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at
last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates.

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prompted by Defoe's novel to write their own Robinsonnades dwelt more
on the idea of establishing a new civilization than on that of Crusoe's
isolation and loneliness and on the theme of isolated individual endeavour.
Crusoe's sense of guilt and fear aroused by his crossing what he felt to be a
forbidden threshold might also by understood as the indirect expression of
feelings known to Defoe himself, for we may imagine that it was not
without great trepidation that the author, approaching the age of sixty,
ventured for the first time into the realm of pure novelistic fiction.
Robinson Crusoe seems to display certain germinal Romantic features as
one not only afflicted by solitude and estranged from society but also as
one prone to a deep sense existential loneliness of the kind more clearly
revealed in the person of the Ancient Mariner, in whom the critic Bernard
Blackstone perceived a manifestation of the figure of the Prodigal Son,
which furnishes evidence corroborating an affinity shared by Robinson
Crusoe and the Prodigal Son. In a manner untypical of literary critics,
Bernard Blackstone as the author of The Lost Travellers: A Romantic Theme
with Variations 3
separates the Romantic poets into one of two camps
according to whether they were “Christians” or not, making Christians of
those who in his view retained a sense of sinfulness and who felt a need for
divinely wrought redemption. Wordsworth did not count as a Christian,
believing as he did like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in humanity’s essential
innocence while seeking a remedy for all ills in measures to improve urban
living conditions. Coleridge qualified as a Christian in keeping with the fact
that the Ancient Mariner evinced an profound sense of guilt and found a
remedy for this in shriving and confession. Jeffrey H. Hartman on the other
hand identifies the Mariner with the Wandering Jew as a fitting symbol
with which to typify the Romantic poets’ sense of being lost and adrift in
an age that was inimical to poets and poetic language. In his essay
3 Bernard Blackstone, The Lost Travellers, Norwich, 1962.

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“Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness” 4
Hartman does not go to great
lengths to justify his assertion but there is textual and circumstantial
evidence in support of his claim. The emphasis on the seemingly accidental
“cross” element in the “crossbow” with which he commits the cardinal sin
of slaying the albatross points to parallel between the Mariner’s distain of
an innocent creature and the Wandering Jew’s act of taunting of Jesus at
the foot of the Cross. Percy Bysshe Shelley makes an explicit reference to
the story of Ahasuerus and Crucifixion in Queen Mab in line with the
original narrative of the legend of the Wandering Jew. However, elsewhere
he interprets the Wandering Jew as a “phantasmal portraiture of
wandering human thought.” 5
Likewise, Wordsworth psychologizes the
same figure when referring to “the wanderer in my soul” in his poem “The
Wandering Jew.” Clearly neither Shelley nor Wordsworth adopted a
doctrinally based hostile anti-Semitic or anti-Judean attitude in this matter.
Goethe had already made use of symbols and motifs rooted in religion in
the service of expressing his concerns with aesthetic and psychological
issues and the Romantic poets continued down the same path.
An interesting variation of standpoint within the broad spectrum of
objective criticism is to be found in the works of Northrop Frye, mentioned
earlier. On one had he doggedly affirms a belief in the radical separation of
literature from all external factors in the domains of biography and history,
etc. ; on the other, he sees all works of literature as part of a vast unity
within which the genres of literature fall into categories that correspond to
the four seasons of the annual cycle. Tragedy is a mythos of spring, satire
of winter, for example At the centre of this system we discover the ruling
archetypes of classical symbolism and the high or low status of literary
forms depends on their distance from this centre. In such terms the novel
is “a low mimetic displacement” of classical archetypes. We see little
4 Geoffrey H. Hartman, "Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness,"'
Romanticism and Consciousness Essays in Criticism, (New York, 1970).
5 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab, VII, 267-275

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acceptance of what other critics discern as the positive and vital nature of
novelistic fiction, its anti-hierarchal force and its power of innovation.
Frye’s refusal to accept the existence of vital connections between
literature and human experience, whether that of an individual or that of
communities throughout history, leads him to adopt a patronizing or
nanny-like attitude to John Milton, a writer who held that literature had a
lot to do with human behavior and revealed truth. This lack of sympathy
and empathy comes to light in passages that include reference to acts of
“wandering.” Indeed, Milton made ample use of the verb to wander in
Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and invested this with a positive
meaning in line with biblical tradition for in this the negative aspect of
wandering as sinning and falling into error is overridden by the curative and
redeeming consequences of wandering through the wilderness of Sinai or
even of the Fall, the felix culpa in Thomist theology. “With wandering feet”
Adam and Eve leave Paradise into the wilderness of history and experience,
where in due time Jesus will also “wander” and thwart the powers of evil.
For Frye wandering is understood only in negative terms, as entrapment
within “the labyrinth of the Law,” not even conceding, as the apostle Paul
did, that the Law at least served as a schoolmaster in the dispensation of
divine providence.
In more general terms Milton’s text implies that the expulsion of Adam and
Eve from Paradise involved entering the worlds of history and experience
"with wand'ring feet," so described in the resounding final lines of Paradise
Lost. To Hulme's allegation that Romantic poetry was “spilt religion” it is
possible to retort that much literary in literary criticism comes over a spilt
theology. By divorcing the anagogic level of interpretation from the
allegorical and the moral levels, which have little validity unless one
perceives a vital connection between the literary text and the life of its
author, Frye deprives the anagogic level itself, as understood by Dante at
least, of any context or profile.
It might appear at first sight that the Romantic poets themselves held
“wandering” in low regard. Blake, after all referred to “the Lakers”

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(Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge) somewhat disparagingly as “cold-
earth wanderers ” in “The Mental Traveller” and Byron mocking described
the youthful Don Juan as one who wandered by glassy brooks thinking of
unutterable thoughts before we encounter the name of Wordsworth a few
lines later. 6 However neither Blake nor Byron wished to scorn wandering
per se, only manifestations of wandering they deemed inferior to their
own. Just as the Wanderer became a synonym for the modern poet, so the
act of wandering became a synonym for the act of composing poetry. In
Adonais Shelley lamented that Keats had ceased to wander, or, in plain
speech, ceased to write poetry. Similarly Goethe and the German
Romantics were bitterly divided over the question as to the nature of the
true Wanderer, even though the Romantics had accepted the term from
Goethe and identified themselves as Wanderers.
The close association of the word Wanderer with poetic inspiration could
well trace back its origin to the days before the Christianization of the
Germanic tribes when Wotan or Odin the Wanderer was feared and
revered as the leading god of wisdom and poetic utterance. Tacitus
recorded that the inhabitants of Germania worshipped Mercury, meaning
Wotan most probably in view of the Germanization of dies Mercurii as
Wednesday (the day of Wotan). Missionary influence saw to the
substitution of the day of Wotan by Mittwoch (the middle day of the
week). Later the aura of the Wanderer passed on to the power of the Holy
Spirit, to the Muses and even to lesser spirits like Puck, “the merry
wanderer of the night” in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In
Milton’s Paradise Lost Christian and Classical notions of divine inspiration
merge in the Holy Muse addressed by the speaker in the opening lines of
the poem. However, the same poet betrays his fear of becoming unseated
and falling from the back of winged Pegasus only to “wander erroneous
and forlorn.” The negative sense of wandering as losing orientation
6 See Dedication to Don Juan, First Canto, 19.

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contrasts ironically with its positive meaning of divine inspiration; here we
might ponder whether Milton already anticipated the crisis of confidence
that would truly come the fore in the age of Goethe and the Romantics. In
his imagination Goethe also stalled in flight on his way to the summit of
Parnassus and plunged into a muddy scree according to the narrative in
“Wandrers Sturmlied,”
According to Dante’s four-fold model of interpretation the term anagogical
referred to the entry of the soul into eternity at the death of the body.
Dante himself depicted this transition in the symbol of the Dark Forest we
find in the introductory line of The Divine Comedy, as this marks the entry
into the domain of the Afterlife. The Divine Comedy has exercised the
imagination of writers in succeeding generations, irrespective of their
persuasion or attitude to the possibility of life after death, prompting them
to explore in their mind putative realms beyond the pale of the known
world. The contemplation of approaching death seems to be reflected in
the last works of Rousseau, Sterne and Goethe by lending to these a certain
quasi-musical rhapsodic quality producing a loosening of form and
structure.
If life is a journey and a literary work invokes the sustaining allegory of a
process like a journey, the end of any work, be this a novel, drama or
poem, reminds us of finality and death. Wandering in literature find
expression in the urge to stave off the inevitable in much the same way
that Scheherazade kept telling stories to avoid execution or Penelope kept
weaving. Contemplation of mortality need not evoke gloom, maudlin and
lugubrious obsessions or despair, as our culture like most cultures finds
ways to invert negatives into positives, which in terms of religious beliefs
and attitudes means resurrection, literal or figurative. To judge by its very
title Wordsworth’s The Prelude might be taken to intimate that the writer’s
uncertain path on his pilgrim through life leads beyond death.
Morbid and maudlin obsessions with death can interfere with the healthy
pursuit of daily living as the story of Hamlet shows all too well. Even

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children’s fairy stories sublimate issues concerned with the two great
taboos of death and sex. Sublimation involves hiding and covering over
things felt to be menacing or unsettling, which brings us back to the subject
of the allegory and the perception of what lies beneath the surface of plain
statements and entertaining or fascinating stories such as that of the Pied
Piper of Hamelin. The poem carries as subtitle the words: “A Child’s Story.”
Indeed, children can and do follow and enjoy the poem like an adult
without the slightest knowledge of poetics, linguists and critical theories.
Its beguiling simplicity and appeal to popular taste seems to have set it
aside in the view of scholars who regard that Browning’s poetic works in
general are characterized by profundity and high seriousness. “How They
Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix” is another casualty of
disregard and for much the same reason. If “The Pied Piper of Hamelin and
“”How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix” are only enjoyed
for their entertainment value we may well ask where the difference lies
between the language of poetry and that of prose, which is also a vehicle
for the recounting of entertaining and gripping stories. Let us pause to
reflect on this difference light on an article written by the Russian
Formalistscholar of linguistics and literature, Jurij Tynjanov.. TheFormalists
had a hard time under Stalin’s regime on account of their lack of
enthusiasm for social realism. Leon Trotsky even accused them of being
followers of Saint John for holding that “in the beginning was the Word.” A
reading of Tynjanov’s paper entitled in English translation “The Meaning of
the Word in Verse” supplies a clear reason for Trotsky’s opinion. Tynjanov,
like other Russian Formalists such as Roman Jacobson and Boris
Eichenbaum based their theoretical propositions on the fundamental
distinction between langue and parole; this it to say, on one side between
the order of language as a system in which words are defined in
dictionaries and syntax analyzed in grammar books. and, on the other,
context-bound language in any statement or text. Any word participates in
both categories, langue and parole. Notwithstanding the fact that the
setting of a word within a poem restricts the bounds of its immediately
recognizable meaning, it retains its connection with the ideal word

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unbounded by any context at all and is therefore inexhaustible in its
potential range of associations. All this sounds very grand, but at least
Tynjanov’s theory could explain why we read and discard newspaper
articles but always return to a favourate poem and gleam something new
from its treasures.
The potentialities of words discovered by Tynjanov can be viewed in the
light of Dante’s distinction between the literal and allegorical senses of a
portion from the Psalms. Only at the literal level can we make a one-word
to one-sense correlation. At the allegorical level words are released from
the constrictions placed on them at the literal level. As Jurij Tynjanov
argued in “The Word in Verse.” 7 words in a poem are subject to the
warping effect of associations that belie their function as subservientparts
of a narrative, a fact that often gives rise to apparent oddities of style,
verbal juxtapositions and what in prose could come across as stylistic
lapses, repetitions and deviations from common usage. Thus the line “He
never can cross that mighty top” in “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” seems an
odd way of stating that the piper will never be able to surmountthe peak of
a high mountain. In Browning’s poem “By the Fire-Side” we come across a
truly glaring departure from good style according to the criteria governing
prose in the line “We crossed the bridge that we crossed before,”
especially in view of the occurrenceof the words “crossed” and “the Cross”
in the immediately preceding lines. We note here a conflation of the word
cross as a verb of motion and a religious symbol so central to the Christian
faith. Other biblical echoes are to be heard. The surviving lame child speaks
of the “land” entry to which the Piper also “promised” him. His idyllic vision
of the land he may not enter recalls the poems “Pisgah Sights I” and Pisgah
7
Jurij Tynjanov, ''The Meaning of the Word in Verse,'' Readings in
Russian, Poetics Formalist and Structuralist Views (ed. Ladislav Mateijka
and Krystina Pomorska). Michigan Slavic Publications: Ann Arbor. 1978.
Original Russian Title: ''Znacenie slova v. stixe '' in Problema
stixotvornogo jazyke. 1924.

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Sights II” by Browning, in which the speaker empathizes with Moses, who at
the point of death laments that he has been denied entry to the Promised
Land. Milton Millhauser sees in the word “pottage” a reference to the
story of Esau and Jacob in the Book of Genesis with regard its imprecation
of Esau’s readiness to sacrifice a spiritual benefit for the sake of immediate
physical gratification.8 There are quite explicit citations of words in the New
Testament, the parable of the camel’s eye, “the trump of doom’s tone” and
a conspicuous number of words that evoke biblical themes, the image of
the children rising from a dark cavern, water symbolism and the plagues of
Egypt. With all this in mind, can we dismiss the implied association of the
words cross and passion and the Mayor’s Sadducean denial that the dead
can ever be revived as purely coincidental? A close regard for individual
words allows us to interpret the poem in the light of Freudian and Jungian
theories of psychology. The red and yellow colours of the Piper’s coat, the
course of his movements from south to west and references to the sun
could lead us to view the Piper, derided as a “wandering fellow” in his coat
of red and yellow, as a solar symbol that represents the quest of the libido
to achieve union with the anima. Goethe and Guillaume Apollinaire
presented the Piper as one who possessed an irresistible power of
attraction over girls and women.
Does the interpretation I suggestaccord with Browning’s life story and with
the history of Pied Piper legend since its origin? To find connections
between poetry and life accords fully with Dante’s assertion that at the
moral level the Exodus story bespeaks the conversion of the believer and
hence the experience of real living people, a contention some schools of
critical opinion firmly deny. Browning composed “The Pied Piper of
Hamelin” at the age of thirty at a decisive juncture in his life. It had not
been easy for him to find his feet as a poet. He destroyed his early verses
and only chance would have it that his poem The First-Born of Egypt”
8 Milton Millhauser, "Poet and Burgher: A Comic Variation on a Serious
Theme," Victorian Poetry, 7 (1969), I63-168.

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survived and this reveals a morbid obsession with the theme of the death
of the young, and the story of Pied Piper is probably the result of the
sublimation of the theme of death. The Byronic tone of early poem could
well be the result of singing lessons he received from Isaac Nathan, the
same man who had prompted Lord Byron to write the Hebrew Melodies.
Browning had also tried his hand as a dramatist with limited success. The
Willie whom Browning addressed in last lines of “The Pied Piper f Hamelin”
was the then recuperating eleven-year-old son of the theatre manager
William Macready, who had staged Browning’s plays, and the admonition
that one should keep one’s promises might have been a jibe directed at
Willie’s father. Browning had received some rough handling from critics,
especially in response to his first published poem Pauline and to Sordello, a
long epic poem that earned Browning the reputation of a willfully obscure
poet. The publication of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” under the general title
of Bells and Pomegranates effected a breakthrough into the area of popular
verse and his life began a turn for the better. Soon he would find his
soulmate and wife in Elizabeth Barratt. Incidentally, The age of thirty or
thereabouts proved propitious for Goethe, Wordsworth and Dylan
Thomas, for at this age they composed their most sublime and memorable
lyrical verses.
The anagogical level in Dante’s hermeneutic scheme refers to the parting
of the soul from the body at death. As the early poem Pauline and a poem
in which the speaker, an Arab physician named Karshish, sifts Lazarus’s
first-hand evidence of the Resurrection, show Browning as deeply affected
by the story of the Resurrection, which I believe underlies another famous
poem by Browning, “How They Broughtthe Good News from Ghent to Aix.”
What was the Good News that the third and only surviving horse brought
to Aix and secured its salvation? Browning espoused his so-called Theory of
the Imperfect, which in the first place reflected his pre-Raphaelite views of
art, in accord with which several of his poems lauded paintings that did not
hide the imperfects of the human frame. The perfection of man remained
for Browning a distant goal but what mattered in the here and now was

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progress and striving toward the perfect state, from the present animalistic
or rat-like condition to the ultimate union of humanity and divinity. “The
Pied Piper of Hamelin” apart from all else is a parable contrasting the rats
and the worst of corrupt and greedy humanity with the saviour-artist and
the young who share his nature and vision. The original story of the Pied
Piper by all reliable accounts goes back to a midsummer event in 1284 at
which young people indulged in dancing and maybe more. The local count
of Spiegelberg probably had a hand in suppressing this ritual practice by
brute force or may have led them on a perilous voyage on the way to
settlements in Pomerania that ended in tragedy. Significantly enough, the
Piper led the children to Calvary, which in the Middle Ages signified a place
of execution or even the jaws of Hell. However, to Browning with his
evangelical upbringing Calvary had altogether positive associations. After
all, the Piper did manage to “cross that mighty top”.

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On the Way Isolated Words Point to the
Allegorical Profundities of Richard the Third,
Macbeth, “I wandered Lonely as a Cloud” and
“The Pied Piper of Hamelin” by Robert
Browning
A: Are references to Golgotha andCalvary in Macbeth and the
legendof the PiedPiper, only Passing Allusions?
,."the tune of the Dance of death to which all dance to damnation is
played by Margaret: and one aspect of the play is our watching the
rats go into the Weser, compelled by that fatal tune." 9
A. P. Rossiter. "Angel with Horns: The Unity of Richard III"
Macbeth, Act 2, Sc. 2
CAPTAIN
9
A. P. Rossiter. "Angel with Horns: The Unity of Richard III," Shakespeare: the
Histories, edited by Eugene M. Waith (New York. 1965) 77.

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Yes, as sparrows eagles, or the hare the lion.
If I say sooth, I must report they were
As cannons overcharged with double cracks,
So doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe.
Exceptthey meant to bathe in reeking wounds,
Or memorize another Golgotha,
The two infamous characters represented in Shakespearean drama named
in the title of this section demonstrate the power of evil in men who stop
at nothing in the pursuit of power, yet these same men differ significantly.
Richard evinces a certain ebullience, almost joie de vivre, while Macbeth
exhibits a lugubrious and saturnine disposition. A close observation of
certain words will show that their respective destinies reflect ancient
notions and beliefs concerning the interrelationship between the annual
cycle of the seasons as expressed in solar mythology and the fate of human
beings. C. G. Jung proposed in his studies into the unconscious that solar
heroes in ancient epics and in subsequent forms of literature personify the
quest of the libido to achieve unity with the anima or the quintessential
female principle residing in the human psyche. Can we discern an
underlying allegorical structure in Richard III and Macbeth? It has been
suggested that the motif of the Pied Piper of Hamelin informs Richard III
and that Macbeth develops the theme of the fall of Satan in the medieval
tradition of the mystery play.
The celebrated opening lines in Richard III – "Now is the winter of our
discontent / Made glorious summer, by this sun of York" - exploit the
metaphoric resonance of references to the seasons in a display of what
might seem at first to be a mere conventional poetic conceit. Notions
aroused by the word winter are usually negative and those of summer
positive. As Richard's opening monologue progresses the positive
associations of summer become tarnished by Richard's depiction of
summer as a time of frivolous amorous pursuits and idle philandering, from
which he feels himself debarred by his ugly and repulsive looks. In the
longer term these did not prevent him from winning the hand, if not the

20
heart, of Lady Anne in a strange manifestation of libidinal energy.
Richard's next mention of summer assumes the form of a proverb in
stating that an early spring forebodes a short summer. His statement is
provoked by the evident precocity of the young Dukeof York revealed in his
perspicacious and spirited repartee in a verbal duel with Richard. Richard's
words ominously reflect that man's designs on the lives of the young
princes, who pose an obstacle to Richard's ambition to become the king of
England.
The play contains significant references to the sun. When Richard is
about to join the fray at the battle of Bosworth Field he is disconcerted by
the sun's invisibility behind a bank of clouds, which to his mind meant a bad
omen of the outcome of the battle from his point of view.
The word night occurs with notable frequency (altogether 26 times),
sometimes conveying the negative association of night as a metaphorical
reference to death and a state of perdition. Indeed, Richard is perceived as
the Devil by Lady Anne and Queen Margaret, an identification which
Richard himself fully endorses and even revels in. His insuppressible zip is
consistent with the notion and feeling of vigour so closely identified with
the advent of the summer, but Richard's gleeful pursuit of evil ends points
to a misdirection and perversion of summer's forcefulness.
Here I recall the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and its variations.
A. P. Rossiter relates Shakespeare's Richard III to the Pied Piper's
associations with the medieval Dance of Death tradition (see citation under
the heading of this discussion). According to Rossiter, it is Margaret who
plays the fatal tune that compels so many to dance their way to damnation.
It could equally well be argued that Gloucester should be identified with
the Piper in his aspect of pseudo-messiah. He feigns piety to win adherents
and on severaloccasions utters the oath "by Paul." The historical Richard III
did actually gain power on June the 26th in 1483. Evidently Shakespeare
found this fact significant. Would he also have known that the Piper
appeared on this day according to the firstversion of the story? Whether or
not this is the case, a number of parallels between Richard and the negative
associations of the Piper as one who takes the young to a place of death

21
come to mind. Richard inveigles the young princes into entering the Tower
of London and has them killed. At his instigation two murderers drown his
brother Clarence in a butt of wine, a fate Clarence anticipates in the telling
of his fearful underwater vision of death. Furthermore, in his famous
opening soliloquy Gloucester speaks of "this weak piping time of peace''
and we find throughout the play references to the sun, the clock and the
Tower as a symbol of time. He proves that he has a way with women when
he woos Anne, the widow of a man he has murdered. Richard is finally
vanquished by Richmond of the House of Tudor, which laid claim to a
lineage going back to King Arthur and the House of David. Shakespeare's
portrayal of Richard as a demon doubtless owes something to the pro-
Tudor propaganda of Sir Thomas More.
On the question as to whether Shakespeare might have had access to
any of the literary sources of the legend I can at best offer conjectures, not
proofs. We know that English actors performed in parts of Germany
including within the Duchy of Braunschweig (Brunswick), wherethestory of
the Piper was documented. At the end of the sixteenth century Duke
Heinrich Julius of Braunschweig encouraged performances of the popular
English actors known in German as the englische Komödianten and indeed
penned a number of crude plays himself. Apparently the figure of the
notorious teller of tall stories, Baron von Münchhausen, owes its origin to a
character drawn by the Duke in one of his plays. From one case at least we
know that a story written in German could exert a powerful influence on an
English drama, for Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus was prompted by a
German chapbook that appeared in print in 1587. It is noteworthy that in
1556 the version of the story of the Pied Piper written by Jobus Fincelius
appeared which possibly for the first time expressly linked the Piper with
the Devil. The earliest known account of the Pied Piper story stated simply:
Anno 1284 am Dage Johanni et Pauli, war der 26 Junii, CXXX Kinder
verledet, binnen Hameln geborn dorch einen Piper mit allerlei Farve
bekleidet gewesen to Calvarie bi den Koppen verloren.

22
In the year 1284 on the day of John and Paul, the 26th of June, 130
children born in Hamelin were led away by a piper dressed in many-
coloured clothes to Calvary close to the Koppen where they were lost.
The first version of story in English, to which a reference was made to
the Pied Piper appeared in 1605 by Richard Verstegan (alias Richard
Rowlands). Verstegan referred to the date of the 22nd. of July, the day of
Saint Mary Magdalene in the Church calendar, as the date of the Pied
Piper's appearance. Verstegan's version of the story served Robert
Browning as a source during the composition of "The Pied Piper of
Hamelin." Browning interpreted the tale in a positive vein as a study of
words relating to solar imagery will show, for these reveal the Piper's
associations with Jesus Christ. The best known pictorial representation of
the Pied Piper, with its implicitly negative bias, was printed in 1592 as the
work of Augustin Moersperg (see illustration below)..
.
As the date of Richard's coup was the 26th of June, also the date of the
Piper's arrivalin Hamelin, I tend to the view that Shakespeare, if we assume
he was acquainted with the legend in any form at all, would have drawn on
a version of the story that made a reference to the 26 th. of June, the day
of Saint John and Saint Paul. Richard makes six references to Saint Paul,

23
albeit when his name is uttered as an oath.
There are significant parallels between the character of Richard and that
of the Pied Piper when interpreted in a negative light These may point to
the concerting influences that reside in the unconscious as postulated by
Carl Gustav Jung. According to his theory relating to the collective
unconscious and to the phenomenon of the solar heroes of ancient
literature, Gilgamesh, Ulysses, Samson and Aeneas, personify the sun, for
Jung a symbol representing the libido in its eternal quest to be at one with
the anima, its female counterpart. Like the sun as it was understood in
earlier times, the solar hero must pass through the realm of night pictured
as a great ocean and the domain of the dead. It is significant that in the
original story the Piper leads the children to Koppen or Calvary. As Herr
Gernot Hüsam plausibly argues in an interview you may read below,
Calvary in medieval times had very negative associations with the jaws of
death and even the mouth of Hell. Koppen, modern research has shown,
may well have been a region where pre-Christian rites were practised
celebrating the period of midsummer. These involved wild dancing and and
even indulgence in orgiastic practices. The Pied Piper may have been Count
Nicholas von Spiegelberg, who allegedly put an end to such practices by
brute force. In his novel Chronique du temps de Charles IX, Prosper
Mérimée interpreted the Pied Piper as the Devil and his victims were also
condemned as heretics, the Huguenots who perished on Saint
Bartholomew's Eve in 1572. Richard III is presented as one who leads his
victims to hell, as in Richard's exhortation to his troops before his final
battle:
"Our strong arms beour conscience, swords our law. /March on, join
bravely, let us to't pell-mell;/If not to heaven, then hand in hand to
hell."
A link between Macbeth and the theme of the fall of Lucifer / Satan is
well attested by literary scholarship. Macbeth is often seen as a once noble
character who becomes increasingly corrupted by pride, ambition and

24
jealousy under the influence of a ruthless and malevolent wife. Whatever
part male chauvinism has played in this interpretation is a question that
need not concern us here. The manifestation of evil that that Macbeth
betrays finds a parallel in Milton's Satan whose antagonism towards God is
attended by a radical subjectivism expressed by the line "The Mind is its
own place," Satan invests the mind with the power to make a Hell of
Heaven, a Heaven of Hell, but this same power also implies entrapment
within an inescapable solipsistic prison, a condition of the kind represses
Macbeth's spirit leading to a state of dismal and turgid resignation
expressed in his soliloquy beginning with the words "Tomorrow and
tomorrow and tomorrow," in which he declares life to be a meaningless
succession of days that ends in death. Such a sense of futility finds
expression in the myth of Sisyphus, who is condemned to repeating
endlessly his task of pushing a boulder up a mountain-side only to see it roll
back down to the low position where he must begin his futile task anew.
The image of Sisyphus, Robert Graves argues, is grounded in a negative
inversion of solar mythology. The sun, far from being a symbol of renewal,
becomes one of vanity and tedious repetition. Macbeth's complaint
amounts to a cosmic affrontdirected again God's creation and God Himself.
The word Golgotha occurs but once in Macbeth, but it is perhaps a hint that
the movement of Birnam wood to Dunsinane serves as a religious allegory
in line with the Christian belief that the Cross, the Tree of Calvary, broke
the power of death and evil. Throughout we note a denial of the life force
of nature symbolically expressed in Lady Macbeth's barrenness and her
fervid denial of the female role of being the giver of life. The massacre of
Macduff's children finds a parallel in the murder of the princes in Richard
III.
Barely thirteen years lie between 1593 and 1606, the years when either
Richard III or Macbeth were completed, yet these plays seem to be set in a
different age. Perhaps we might say that Richard III marks the end of the
Renaissance with its belief in human self-assertion in ways both good and
evil. Richard anachronistically proposed to outdo Machiavelli in the exercise
of ruthlessness yet Machiavellianism existed before Machiavelli. Macbeth

25
reflects the new mood of pessimism that would haunt the minds of poets
and artists in the age to which we attach the words baroque and
mannerism. With remarkable precision the caesura that divides the two
epochs in question coincides with the dynastic transfer from the House of
Tudor to the House of Stuart. In fact Shakespeare penned Macbeth in
honour of James the First of England, which might be seen as a compliment
and a somewhat backhanded one at that.
The faces of Good and Evil may change with the times but in all their
essentials they remain much the same, though in our age these terms are
often scorned as outworn and medieval. We have had our version of an evil
rat-catcher in Hitler and our version of the sullen calculating Macbeth in
Stalin. The Bomb reminds us of the dangers that could lead all to dusty
death. We are worried about fall-out, if not the Fall. I leave you with a line
from "We have learned the fairy tales by heart" Dylan Thomas:
Death and evil are twin spectres.
What shall destruction count if these are fixtures?
Why blot the picture of elves and satyrs
If these two gnomes remain unmoved by strictures?
B: "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" – THE MYTH OF
NARCISSUS AND MILTON’S MUSE
1. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" Viewed in the Light of J. Tynjanov's
Discussion of "The Word in Verse"
One difference between a gardener’s comments on daffodils over the
neighbour’s fence and Wordsworth's description of these flowers in "I
wandered lonely as a cloud" resides in the fact that the poem is part of a

26
literary tradition and therefore invites comparison with other poems
addressed to the same theme. Frederick A. Pottle considers this poem in
the light of tradition in an article entitled "The Eye and the Object in the
Poetry of Wordsworth." 10 He notes with reference to "I wandered lonely
as a cloud":
Ever since 1807, when Wordsworth published this poem, daffodils
have danced and laughed, but there is nothing inevitable about it.
The Greek myth of Narcissus is not exactly hilarious; and even
Herrick, when he looked at daffodils saw something far from jocund.
Even after 1807 a reference to daffodils in poetry may still retain an
element of solemnity admixed with religious mysticism, as the final strophe
of A. E. Housman's "The Lent Lily" makes clear:
Bring baskets now, and sally
Upon the spring's array,
And bear from hill and valley
The daffodil away
That dies on Easter day.
The daffodils described in "I wandered lonely as a cloud," whatever their
mythical and traditional associations, recall a real event in Wordsworth's
life and personal experience. Pottle ponders whether a recognition of this
fact can contribute to an evaluation of Wordsworth's poem, thus broaching
one of the most contentious issues in literary criticism: What is the
relationship between poetry and "external" factors in the domains of a
poet's biography and historical setting? Wishing to clarify the nature of this
10 Frederick A. Pottle, "The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth,"
Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1970) 273-287.
Originally in Yale Review. Vol. (Autumn 1951).

27
relationship, Pottle cites the entry in Dorothy's journal telling of the
occasion when sheand her brother suddenly came across the daffodils, the
abiding impression of which is captured in "I wandered lonely as a cloud."
Pottle attaches great importance to divergences between the description of
the daffodils recorded in the journal and Wordsworth's poetic vision of the
flowers, for these, according to Pottle, enable a critic to ascertain the scope
of the imagination’s particular sphere of operation in treating material
drawn from sense data and experienced events.
Pottle notes two highly significant divergences between Dorothy's and
her brother's descriptions of daffodils in "I wandered lonely as a cloud."
First, the poem conveys the point of view of a solitary speaker beside a
lake. The discrepancy between the descriptions of daffodils in poem and
journal entails a polarity between the "solitariness" of the speaker and the
"sociability" imputed to the crowd of daffodils, endowed as they are, both
in poem and journal, with the human attributes of joy and the ability to
laugh and dance. A further discrepancy between poem and journal
concerns implications of word choice. While in Dorothy's account there is a
reference to a "wind" that animated the scene she described, the poem
assigns vital power to a "breeze." Dorothy's journal leaves no doubt that
the April day on which she and her brother were impressed by the sight of
daffodils was overcast and far from spring-like in any positive sense.
Despite certain misgivings about Wordsworth's choice of the word
"breeze," Pottle concedes that the mildness it implies is fully consistent
with the positive, indeed triumphant, mood engendered by the poem.
According to Pottle the "simple" joy evinced by the daffodils reveals the
workings of the imagination as it transmutes raw experience and the
emotions it arouses into one "simple emotion." Adducing evidence from
"The Leech Gatherer" and other poems, Pottle argues that Wordsworth's
imagery rarely incorporates an exact record of particular memories. Indeed,
he calls into question whether the poem owes any intrinsic quality to the
memory of an actual incident. For him the poem is essentially the product
of the simplifying and unifying operation of the imagination, and as such
poses "a very simple poem."

28
Is “I wandered lonely as a cloud“ as simple as Pottle suggests? I find
grounds for the view that the poem is far from simple in any unqualified
sense. For reasons I shall now adduce, one may trace a certain ambiguity in
the "simple" joy attributed to the daffodil encountered by the speaker
during his walk besides a lake.
Pottle himself establishes that the poem contains a juxtaposition of
contrasting elements in noting the polarity of "solitariness" and
"sociability." With reference to a similarity in the appearance of the
daffodils and the nebulous aspect of the Milky Way, Pottle intimates a
further contrast or polarity associating the earthbound and the celestial or,
on the temporal plane, day and night. Our sense of the poem's complexity
may be much enhanced if we reflect on the effects produced by the set of
contrasts that informthe poem. Let us consider these interlocking contrasts
in greater detail. An antithetic relationship between the earthbound
wanderer and the cloud to which he compares his motion poses the first
intimation of the opposition between the earthly and celestial.
The ‘cloud” establishes a reference to things of nebulous appearance, and
hence a classification that subsequently embraces the visual effects of the
daffodils, specks of light reflected by the lake, and the Milky Way. The
strophe containing the reference to the Milky Way poses a later addition to
the poem's original three strophes. However, this addition reinforces a
contrast implicit in the poem as it originally stood, a contrast rooted in the
distinction between two modes of consciousness, that of the mind exposed
to the intrusion of sensations from the external world and that of the mind
creating its own images in dreams and dreamlike conditions. In other
words, we are dealing here with modes of interaction between the
conscious and unconscious. The wanderer experiences two visions of
daffodils, those seen in a natural environment, and those perceived by his
mind in "pensive mood."
Only the daffodils independently created in the poet's mind should fully
express "purejoy" according to the logic of Pottle's arguments, as only they
have undergonethe full process of ingestion effected by the simplifying and
unifying power of the imagination. If this is not the case, why should the

29
speaker distinguish between the vision of daffodils perceived by the inward
eye and the daffodils which the speaker saw when out walking? A number
of Wordsworth's works contain lines implying that immediate visual
perception entail a sense of discomfort at a time before the mind is able to
assimilate new sense impressions. Even in "I wandered" Wordsworth's
choice of words suggests that the speaker suffers the intrusion of an
invincible, albeit joyful, invasion appearing as a "host" in the (military)
formation of ten thousand. While an element of threat is at most implied in
"I wandered lonely as a cloud," the military connotation of "host" in biblical
English is fully explicit in the opening of another of Wordsworth's poems,
"To the Clouds":
Army of Clouds! Ye winged Host in troops.
Frederick Pottle's discussion of "I wandered lonely as a cloud" reveals a
high degree of sensitivity to the implication of particular words found in the
poem, notably "breeze," "dance" and "daffodil" with the latter’s power of
evoking the myth of Narcissus. It is in some ways odd that Pottle makes no
reference to the verb "wandered" despite its strategic position in the first
line of the poem. We noted earlier the near invisibility of verbs in
comparison to substantives. A linguist might explain this phenomenon as
the resultof the verb's diffuse influence on the stream of discourse. Be that
as it may, in the process of considering the occurrenceof "wandered" in the
light of its position, meaning and structural function, I now hope to
complement and amplify Pottle's arguments and insights respecting "I
wandered lonely as a cloud." Taking a leaf fromDante's four-level approach
to interpreting a text and setting the word "wandered" at the centre of the
four contextual planes proposed above, let us consider the word at four
levels of significance, namely:
 First, what does "wandered" mean in the light of its immediately
recognisable context?
 Second, how does the word function as an element in the poem viewed
as an aesthetic construct?

30
 Third, what is the word's significance as an index of Wordsworth's
development both as a private individual and a poet?
 Fourth, how does the word relate to poetic tradition and the
"allegorical" aspect of the poem?

In the following four sections (i - iv), these questions will be addressed in
the order given above.
i Romantic poets occasionally chose the verb to wander in statements
which made disparaging reference to the works of their contemporaries,
though they themselves accorded the word high significance in their own
works. In Don Juan there is a reference to Juan as a youth who "wandered
by glassy brooks, / Thinking unutterable things." These words, found in the
19th stanza of the first Canto, are followed in the next stanza by a
reference to Wordsworth:
He, Juan (and not Wordsworth), so pursued
His self-communion with his own high soul.
I can imagine that Byron, when writing these lines, had "I wandered
lonely as a cloud" in mind, as they point to two essential aspects of
"wandering" in that poem: namely physical movement and the heightened
state of consciousness that attends such movement. Some proponents of
literary theory see poetry as the product of a purely mental process, which
leads them to deny with the zeal of the ancient Gnostics any living and
reciprocal ties between poetry and physical, historical or biographical
reality, but if we ignore or belittle the physical nature of the motion
referred to in the poem, we will make little sense of the essential contrast
that lies at the heart of the poem, namely that which emerges when we
compare the effects of physical perception with the power of the mind to
produce its own images autonomously.
For all his mockery of Wordsworth "wandering," Byron's use of the verb

31
to wander betrays his concern with the same fundamental relationship
between the inner world of thought and imagination and the outer world
that intrudes into a traveller's consciousness through the channel of
sensory perception. As the poetry of both Byron and Wordsworth shows,
the experience of unexpected sights or other sensations could induce
feelings of vulnerability, which in turn prompted the quest for a
countervailing influence, some process of the mind capable of ingesting
elements of extraneous origin. The experience of physical motion and
travel, as we know, will always tend to enhance a person's awareness of
the exterior environment. This normal enhancement was heightened
further in the Romantic period. As M. M. Bakhtin has pointed out, the
poetry of Byron was subject to the process of "novelization." 11 The novel is
that genre which in its nature thwarts any attempt to impose a hierarchical
structure upon it, even when influencing that most traditional of genres,
poetry. The typical proclivity of Wordsworth and Byron to grasp some
apparently unimportant object or incident and invest this with universal
significance finds a precedent in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Les Rêveries du
Promeneur Solitaire and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, in both
cases the author’s final work. It would seem from this that we are dealing
here with a general literary rather than a purely poetical phenomenon in
Romantic verse and its immediate precursor, the literature of sensibility.
ii. We may understand "wandering" in terms of structure and principles of
organization that govern the development of the poem. Set at the
beginning of the poem, the words "I wandered" function as a leitmotif
introducing both the poem's theme, i.e. subject matter, and the
"wandering" process that emerges from a study of the poem's aesthetic
achievements as revealed in its images in their immediate verbal
environment. In the German poetry of the same period this leitmotif is
announced officially in the titles of celebrated poems. One of these lends
itself to comparison with "I wandered lonely as a cloud" with particular
11 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin Tx., 1981).

32
regard to the implications of the initial position of words referring to
"wandering": Wilhelm Müller's poem "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust"
("Wandering is the Miller’s Joy") - a poem that will be considered in due
course. According to its immediately comprehensible meaning, Wandern
refers to the act of roaming in a rural setting, just as "wandered" does in
Wordsworth's poem. However, from the first line on, it gains ever wider
references and associations with movements in objects and natural
phenomena exemplified by the turning of millstones and the flowing
stream that causes their turning, with the final effect that "wandering"
emerges as the vital principle in all nature. This widening of associations is
reinforced by a repetition of Wandern (formally justified by the use of a
refrain).
In "I wandered lonely as a cloud” the verb to wander also accumulates
ever greater meaning, but not as a result of any verbal repetition. Its
widening of meaning is produced by the poet's use of similes with all their
effects and structuralrepercussions. In the first simile (located in the words
"as a cloud"), the speaker likens himself to a cloud, as he and this object are
both solitary and in motion. We may infer from this comparison that just as
the cloud is moved by a "breeze," some correspondent breeze impels the
speaker's wandering. This breeze then assumes the aspect of a universal
dynamic principle of the mind and poetic imagination. Hence the parallel
between the daffodils "fluttering in the breeze" and the daffodils created in
the poet's heart, which "dances with the daffodils."
The second simile in the poem compares the appearance of the daffodils
encountered by the speaker to the stars of the Milky Way. How - in view of
the fact that the stanza containing this simile was added to the original
poem of three stanzas - can this poem pose an integral element of the
entire poem? The objection I anticipate is surmountable if the simile can be
shown to enhance and develop motifs and characteristics of the poem in its
original form. The reference to the Milky Way adds strength to the motif
established by words evoking the image of something nebulous: (cf.
"cloud," "host" and dancing "waves"). The reference to the stars of night
points to a duality, already implicit in the original poem, that inheres in the

33
contrast of daylight vision and the images produced by the mind at times of
repose. Though the speaker does not sleep when experiencing the vision of
daffodils that flash before his inner mind, his state of consciousness
resembles that of the dreamer. The motif of the "night-wanderer" can be
found in both English and German poetic traditions. We recall the words of
Puck in A Midsummer-Night's Dream. "I am that merry wanderer of the
night."
Let us now return to Frederick Pottle's assertion that "I wandered
lonely" is "a very simple poem." It may appear to be very simple. The
similes it contains apparently conform to the typical use of language in non-
literary usage, yet, at a deeper level they imply contrasts and antitheses
rooted in the unconscious and the imagination. Similarly, the reference to
"a poet" in the third strophe might be taken as a commonly encountered
expression like, "If only an artist could paint this landscape." At a deeper
level, however, it points to Wordsworth's fundamental concern with the
operation and nature of the poet's imagination.
iii. From the following lines in The Borderers (1795) it is apparent that the
associations of the verb to wander were not always positive and evocative
of joy:
No prayers, no tears, but hear my doom in silence
I will go forth a wanderer on the earth,
A shadowy thing, and as I wander on
No human ear shall ever hear my voice
As contradictory as the verb's associations with death and joy in the
exercise of the imagination may seem, its range of significance embraces
these antipodes in the works of William Shakespeare and those of other
authors for reasons discussed earlier in reflections based on the common
etymology of the verbs to wander and wandern. In Wordsworth's case the
positive or negative valorization of the verb to wander corresponds to the
general state of mind in which he found himself at different stages of his

34
life and artistic development.
the time of his writing The Borderers, he was still experiencing a dark
night of the soul precipitated by his disillusionment with the course of the
French Revolution. At that time he was subject to the influence of
Friederich Schiller's Die Räuber ("The Bandits"), a drama that portrays a
world torn apart by the titanic fury of those exercising the wrong kind of
freedom. The play reflects the spirit of Sturm und Drang ("Storm and
Stress"), through which both Goethe and Schiller passed in the early phase
of literary development. In Goethe's highly influential novel Die Leiden des
jungen Werthers("TheSorrows of Young Werther") Werther's reference to
himself as a "Wanderer" ominously points forward to his social isolation
and ultimate death.
"I wandered lonely as a cloud" marks the apogee of Wordsworth'spoetic
achievement. At the time of its composition Wordsworth had overcomethe
weaknesses of his early works and the lugubrious mentality that they
evince. In the same period we find no anticipation of the diminution in
poetic powers and final atrophy of the imagination that later overcame
Wordsworth. "I wandered lonely as a cloud" marks the attainment of a
balance and harmony of mind wrested from the tension between daytime
awareness and the influences of subconscious proclivities. The attainment
of this harmony involves the ingestion of images originating in the
involuntary reception of what is perceived by the senses. The equilibrium
we perceive in poem was preceded by - perhaps predicated on - a period
when Wordsworth became familiar with contemporary German literature
and philosophy as this was mediated to him by T. S. Coleridge. According to
Jonathan Wordsworth, the poet was deeply impressed by a translation of
Goethe's poetic dialogue entitled "Der Wanderer," which he read no later
than 1798 12. Professor L. A. Willoughby notes in his article "The Image of
the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry" that "Der Wandrer"
(1771-1772), established Goethe’s ability to objectify the figure of the
Wanderer within the frame of a dramatic dialogue without suppressing
12 Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity, (New York and Evanston, 1969).

35
every trace of the author’s individual personality.13
iv. Ithas been noted earlier in this discussion that Frederick Pottle contrasts
the elegiac undertones of Herrick's description of daffodils with the
triumphant and joyful emotions evoked by Wordsworth's description of
these flowers. Daffodils recall a tradition that includes the story of
Narcissus in Greek mythology. We have also seen that Housman
intertwines the Greek classical myth with Christian folklore in his image of
the daffodil that dies on Easter Day (in common usage daffodils are called
"Osterglocken" ("Easter Bells") in countries where German is spoken). I will
argue in this section that the very use of the verb to wander likewise
implies and reflects a confluence of biblical and classical traditions. I also
hope to establish that the word is coloured - to use a term that is much
favoured by the Russian Formalist linguist and critic J. Tynjanov 14 - by a
contemporary influence stemming from Goethe and a diachronically
mediated influence stemming from Milton, that poet who consciously
merged classical and biblical or Hebraic elements in his epic poetry. A close
analysis of certain passages in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained shows
that the verb to wander is contextually associated to both the classical
motif of the "wandering" Muse and to the biblical motif of the wanderings
of Israel described in the book of Exodus and the cognate period of Christ's
wandering in the Judean wilderness, events commemorated by the festivals
of Passover and Lent. This nexus of associations is implicit in the opening
lines of Paradise Lost, in which the collocation of the words "Muse" and
"Horeb" (Sinai) knit together references to the Muse, the Holy Spirit and
the immediate sequel of the flight of the Israelites from Egypt
13
L. A. Willoughby, "The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry,"
Etudes Germaniques, 1951, 3, Autumn 1951.
14 Jurij Tynjanov, "The Meaning of the Word in Verse," translated into English by M. E.
Suino, Readings in Russian Poetics, ed. Ladislav Matejka & Krystina Pomorska, (Ann
Arbor, 1978).

36
(commemorated by the Jewish Festival of Pentecost).15 In Paradise
Regained Milton mirrors the traditional view, upheld by Dante and
inscribed in the Church calendar at Lent, that the wanderings of Israel
allegorically represent the earthly life and ministry of Christ,16 the forty
days of temptation recalling the forty years of Israel's wandering in the
wilderness of Sinai. In keeping with this tradition the title of Housman's
"The Lent Lily” conflates the associated symbolism of Lent, Easter and
daffodils). Alluding to a passage in Paradise Regained, Keats taps the same
traditional sources when uniting the theme of vernal renewal and that of a
pilgrimage leading through a wilderness:
And now at once, adventuresome, I send
My herald thought into a wilderness -
There let its trumpet blow, and quickly dress
My uncertain path with glee. Endymion 1, 58-61
Here is an echo of Milton's line "And Eden raised m the wilderness" in
Paradise Regained 1, 7. The association of vernal renewal and pilgrimage
occurs a little later in Endymion in an allusion to the evocation of spring in
‘The Prologue” of The Canterbury Tales.
We now consider a further instance of Milton's influence on a work by a
Romantic poet, and one that is directly relevant to a discussion of "I
wandered lonely as a cloud." Again we consider a poetic evocation of spring
15 The Festival of Weeks (Hebr.: Shavuot) or Pentecost marks the end of the counting of
omer (cuttings of harvest crops in the spring harvest), and became linked by tradition
with the Giving of the Law at Mount Sinai. Philo of Alexandria closely associated this
event with a manifestation of divine inspiration symbolized by the finger of fire that
inscribed the tablets of the Law. The Christian sequel to Pentecost reflects the Christian
belief that the Holy Spirit supersedes the literal stipulations of the Law.
16
Both in Il Convivio (The Banquet) and the Letter to Can Grande della Scala, Dante
referred to the "allegorical" level of the story of the biblical exodus at which Dante
discerned a prophecy concerning Christ's life and work of redemption.

37
combined with an allusion to the story of the flight of the Israelites from
Egypt. The opening lines of the first book of Wordsworth's The Prelude
refer to a flight from "a house of bondage" and a "wandering cloud" that
should guide the poet on his future journey. Here we discover obvious
allusions to the flight from Egypt in the Bible and the pillar of cloud guiding
the Israelites by day.
To understand the deep significance of "the gentle breeze," at the
beginning of The Prelude we should consider these words in the light of
Milton's dedication to the Holy Muse that inspired Moses at Mount Horeb
(we note the intertwining of both biblical and classical strands) at an
analogous position in Paradise Lost. The verbal triad that consists of
"breeze," "wandering" and "cloud" finds a parallel in the words
"wandered," "breeze" and "cloud" in "I wandered lonely as a cloud." We
often note in criticism that verbal patterns recur and suggest underlying
modes of thought influenced by the operations of the unconscious. Here
we may recall that Wordsworth composed "I wandered lonely as a cloud"
during a period of active preparation for The Prelude of 1805.
While The Prelude contains a specific reference to passages in Milton's
works, "I wandered lonely as a cloud" contains no literary allusions at all.
Here, the very order of words in the poem implies antitheses that accord
with a mythical-religious frame of comprehension. To make this assumption
is to be no bolder than Frederick Pottle was when he discusses the myth of
Narcissus in connection with Wordsworth's description of daffodils in "I
wandered lonely as a cloud." Indeed, in their profound implications “the
daffodil” in Housman's "Lent Lily" and the daffodil in folklore share an
affinity with the implications of to wander in poetic tradition, for the flower
and the verb pose the meeting-point of classical and Biblical traditions. The
event which prompted the writing of "I wandered lonely as a cloud"
occurred on the eve of Good Friday (Good Friday fell on 16th April, 1802),
yet a further reason to suppose that the sight of daffodils described in the
poem was bound up with the thought of Easter in Wordsworth's mind.
If we were to follow Housman's lead and place an ostensibly religious
construction on the daffodils in "I wandered lonely," I think we should

38
emphasize their triumphant, perhaps "Pentecostal," aspect in view of the
all-pervasive influence of the breeze and the almost flame-like appearance
of the flowers. This is not to say that we should place the poem in the
tradition of religious mystical poetry, for, as this discussion of "wandering"
has indicated, words mark an intersection of traditional and contemporary
influences. In the case of "I wandered lonely as a cloud" the traditional
influence is predominantly Milton’s, the contemporary, Goethe’s. Subject
to this dual influence Wordsworth combined traditional religious insight
with the then modern insights of psychological and aesthetic philosophy.
The recall of a pilgrimage is explicit in The Prelude and Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage, while it is but suggested by the ordering of simple sounding
words in "I wandered lonely as a cloud."
The poem might also be understood as a quest to overcome the rift
between the worlds of inner and outward reality announced in the
Cartesian cogito ergo sum, and its traumatic after-effect so palpably
reflected in The Rime of the AncientMariner. Itis noteworthy that the word
"breeze" signifies the vital powers of the imagination in both "I wandered
lonely" and Coleridge’s ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, however
different these poems are in theme. In Coleridge's narrative a "breeze" fills
the sails of the mariner's doomed ship only when he perceives sea serpents
moving by the light of the moon. Like Wordsworth's dancing daffodils the
serpents combine beauty and motion, both of which attributes were seen
as virtuous in their own right by the poets of the age. In fact, these virtues
exercise a mutual benefit. Beauty alone might, as the legend of Narcissus
suggests, bring entrapment and a deathlike stasis. Motion without some
corrective might lead to frenzy and self-dissipation. It is "the breeze" which
makes the daffodils in Wordsworth's celebrated poem "dance." In poetic
tradition "dancing" is not always positive in connotation. We need only
think of the Dance of Death. However, in Wordsworth’s poem "dancing”
motion counteracts the stasis implied by the daffodil's mythical import. This
image implies therefore a balance of beauty and motion.
While it is evident that Romantic poems lie outside the category of
formalreligious poetry, I find no reason to accept view that they possess no

39
religious message. Here it is relevant to consider the basic implication of
poetic "wandering” as a quest to reconcile apparently irreconcilable
opposites and antitheses, a quest based on the assumption that at a higher
level than that at which such opposites appear irreconcilable, harmony and
reconciliation can be achieved.
"Wandering" defies the strict separation of internal truth and external
reality. "The way" described in poems about wandering, is part of the life of
individual experience. How can one come to any different conclusion when
ne considers "wandering" which subsumes the effects created by the verbs
to wander and wander in their various textual settings, in works by Milton,
Goethe and Wordsworth? From the poetry of Keats we learn that "truth"
and "life" are indivisible in "beauty."
C: Religious and Solar Symbolism Implied by Individual
Words and their Combined Effects in Robert Browning’s
“The Pied Piper of Hamelin.”
A word on the title of this section. What is all this about solar and religious
symbolism being embedded in the words of Robert Browning’s “The Pied
Piper of Hamelin”? The first point to make here is this: references to the
sun and those to a text in the New Testament, “the trump of doom’s tone”
and words with a decidedly biblical ring are there to be read, whatever
significance one may or may not attach to them. The basic facts relating to
the Pied Piper point to the association of the figure with summer and the
domain of religion and mysticism. All accounts of the legend place the
event of the Piper’s appearance in Hamelin in the early or middle days of
summer, the season for dancing and musical diversion as Richard III in the
Shakespearean drama that bears his name well knew. The sun according to
the psychological theories of Jung and Freud represents the libido in search
of its feminine counterpart the anima. Clearly the figure who goes by the

40
name of Pied Piper 17 in English and der Rattenfänger in German (though
the original versions of the legend make no reference to rats) evinces
enviable powers of erotic allurement. Goethe had girls and women chase
after him, and not only children, in “Der Rattenfänger,” and mulled over
placing him in the Witches’ Sabbath presented in a scene in Faust Part I.
However, in broader terms the libido represents more than anything we
could bracket off as explicitly sexual, for it also stands for vigour, potency,
the life force itself, which explains the Piper’s appeal to children and youth
in Browning’s “ditty” as the natural consequence of their shared affinities.
On the other hand, potency can lead to both good and evil ends, which
makes the Pied Piper a very ambivalent figure indeed, as literary
representations of him through the centuries, either as the devil or a
Christlike savior, indicate so clearly.
Robert Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” is quoted below in full
with certain words highlighted in yellow or blue. Those highlighted in
yellow evince an aspect that connects them with the sun and the South,
those in blue with matters to do with religion and the Bible in some way. I
am not the only one to have discerned references to religious themes to be
found in Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” as the noted scholar in the
field of depth psychology Iacob Levi found in the three notes by which the
Pied Piper began his music playing an allusion to the Trinity. 18 Sometimes
solar and biblical imagery merge as in the case of the implication of the
word “risen” or that of the words “under the sun.” Milton Millhauser noted
that the word “pottage” recalled the biblical episode in which Esau sold his
birthright to Jacob thus sacrificing a spiritual blessing for the sake of a
17 The first mention of the Pied Piper (Pide Piper) we find in an account of the legend by
Richard Verstegan which the author published in 1605.
18 See Iakov Levi, “”Il Pifferaio di Hamelin,” Feb. 2002:
http://www.reocities.com/psychohistory2001/Hamelin.html andò per le vie, ed emise
appena tre note [ il tre, numero sacro e simbolo della Santa Trinità]. Si udì un correre di
piedini, scarpe di legno risuonare sui ciottoli, battere di mani e vociare di piccoli. Tra
calpestii e risa correvano bambini e ragazzetti con le guance rosa, i riccioli biondi, gli
occhi vispi e i denti come perle tra labbra rosso rubino, tutti dietro al Pifferaio di
Hamelino.

41
material gratification. 19 There are however quite explicit pointers to biblical
passages in the poem such as those made to “the Trump of Doom’s tone”
or the warning of Jesus concerning the entrapment of riches. Otherwise,
individual words support the religious symbolism that pervades the poem
despite the fact that their primary meanings at the literal level bear no
reference to religious matters. It is simply the aggregation of their
secondary meanings within their general lexical range of meanings that
underlines a central religious motif, such words being ”cross” with the
primary senseof to traverse, passion, primarily a synonymof rage or a fit of
anger and the Mayor of Hamelin’s words ”What’s dead can’t come to life,
think.” Note here the contrast of words within a given context and words
unbounded by any context at all, a phenomenon noted by Jurij Tynjanov in
his article translated into English as “The Meaning of the Word in Verse.” 20
Occurrences of the word ”promise,” either as a noun or a verb, underline
appear twice in the final line of the poem and in close proximity to “land”
evoke the theme of the Exodus and the journey to the Promised Land.
The solar symbolism of the poem comes through in various ways, some
seemingly trivial as in the case of a reference to “Sunday hats,” some
imbued with a mystical or religious association as in the case of the word
‘risen.” As Arthur Dixon argued in his article “Browning’s Source for The
Pied Piper of Hamelin,” Browning was most probably acquainted with at
least one early version of the Pied Piper story, according to which the Piper
led 130 children born in Hamelin to Calvary.21
19 Milton Millhauser, "Poet and Burgher: A Comic Variation on a Serious Theme,"
Victorian Poetry, 7 (1969), I63-168.
20 Jurij Tynjanov, "The Meaning of the Word in Verse," in Readings in Russian Poetics /
Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. by Ladislav Mateijka and Krystina Pomorska
(Michigan Slavic Publications, Ann Arbor, 1978), 136-145.
21 Arthur Dixon,”Browning’s Source for The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” Studies in
Philology, Vol. XXIII, July 1926, No, 3, See:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4171951?sid=21105471469621&uid=70&uid=4&
uid=2&uid=3738240&uid=2129

42
With regard to Browning’s dissemination of verbal clues “The Pied Piper
of Hamelin” is altogether typical and Barbara Melchiori noted the poet’s
habitual practice of concealing his deep concerns beneath the surface of
beguiling narratives. 22 Browning’s deep concern with the subject of the
Resurrection shows itself explicitly in his works written before and after
1842, the year in which he composed “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” 23 The
poem was originally part of a collection of poems under the general title of
Bells and Pomegranates, which recalls the hem of the garment worn be the
High Priest when conducting his obligations in the Holy of Holies. 24
THE PIED PIPEROF HAMELIN
I.
Hamelin’s Town’s in Brunswick.
By famous Hanover city;
The river Weser, deep and wide,
Washes its wall on the southern side:
A pleasanter spotyou never spied;
But, when begins my ditty,
Almost five hundred years ago,
To see the townsfolk suffer so
Fromvermin, was a pity.
II.
Rats!
They foughtthe dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
22 Barbara Melchiori, Browning's Poetry of Reticence (London, 1968), 1.
23 Viz. Pauline, 848-854 and “An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience
of Karshish, the Arab Physician.”
24 Judith Berlin-Lieberman, Robert Browning and Hehraism, (Diss. Zurich; Jerusalem:
Ariel Press, 1934).

43
And licked the soup fromthe cooks’ 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.
III.
At last the people in a body
To the Town Hall came flocking:
“ ‘Tis clear,” cried they, “our Mayor’s a noddy;
“And as for our Corporation – shocking
“To think we buy gowns lined with ermine
“For dolts that can’t or won’tdetermine
“What’s best to rid us of our vermin!
“You hope, because you’reold and obese,
“To find in the furry civic robe ease?
“Rouseup, sirs!Give your brains a racking
”To find the remedy we’relacking,
“Or, sureas fate, we’ll send you packing!”
At this the Mayor and Corporation
Quaked with a mighty consternation.
IV.
An hour they sat in council,
At length the Mayor brokesilence:
“For a guilder I’d my ermine gown sell;
“I wish I werea mile hence!
“It’s easy to bid one rack one’s brain –
“I’msuremy poor head aches again,
“I’vescratched it so, and all in vain
“Oh for a trap, a trap, a trap!”

44
Just as he said this, what should hap
At the chamber door but a gentle tap?
“Bless us,” cried the Mayor, “what’s that?”
(With the Corporation as he sat,
Looking little though wondrous fat;
Nor brighter was his eye, nor moister
Than a too-long-opened oyster,
Savewhen at noon his paunch grew mutinous
For a plate of turtle green and glutinous)
”Only the scraping of shoes on a mat?
“Anything like the sound of a rat
“Makes my soulgo pit-a-pat!”
V.
“Come in!” – the Major cried, looking bigger
And in did come the strangestfigure!
His queer long coat fromheel to head
Was half of yellow and half of red,
And he himself was tall and thin,
With sharp blue eyes, each like a pin,
And light loose hair, yet swarthy skin
No tuft on cheek nor beard on chin,
But lips where smile went out and in:
There was no guessing his kith and kin: 25
And nobody could enough admire
The tall man and his quaint attire.
Quoth one: It’s as if my great-grandsire,
”Starting up at the Trump of Doom’s tone,
“Had walked his way from his painted tombstone!”
25 Hebrews 7.3.

45
VI.
He advanced to the council-table:
And, “Please your honours,” said he, “I’mable,
“By means of a secret charm, to draw
“All creatures living beneath the sun, 26
“That creep or swimor fly or run,
“After me so as you never saw!
“And I chiefly use my charm
“On creatures that do people harm,
“The mole and toad and newt and viper;”
“And people call me the Pied Piper.”
(And here they noticed round his neck
A scarf of red and yellow stripe.
To match with his coat of the self-samecheque;
And at the scarf’s end hung a pipe;
And his fingers, they noticed, were ever straying
As if impatient to be playing
Upon this pipe, as low it dangled
Over his vesture so old-fangled.)
“Yet,” said he, ”poor piper as I am
“In Tartary I freed the Cham,
Last June, from his huge swarmof gnats,
“I eased in Asia the Nizam
“Of a monstrous brood of vampire-bats:
“And as for what your brain bewilders,
“If I can rid your town of rats
“Will you give me a thousand guilders?”
“One?” fifty thousand! – was the exclamation
Of the astonished Mayor and Corporation.
26 Ecclesiastes 1.9.

46
VII.
Into the street the Piper stept,
Smiling firsta little smile,
As if he knew what magic slept
In his quiet pipe the while:
Then like a musician adept,
To blow his pipe his lips he wrinkled,
And green and blue his sharp eyes twinkled,
Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled:
And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered,
You heard as if an army muttered;
And the muttering grew into a grumbling;
And the grumbling grew into a mighty rumbling;
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.
Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,
Graveold plodders, gay young friskers,
Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,
Cocking tails and prickling whiskers,
Families by tens and dozens,
Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives,,-
Followed the Piper for their lives
Fromstreet to street he piped advancing,
And step for step they followed dancing
Until they came to the river Weser
Wherein all plunged and perished!
- Saveone who, as stout as Julius Caesar, 27
27 The idea of a surviving rat which lives to tell his fellow creatures about his vision of a
consumerist paradise is pure satire and highly amusing, but Browning’s humour should
not lull us into supposing he is not also concerned with serious, even grim, realities. Here
I suspect the reason why Browning’s most celebrated poem has received relatively little
critical attention. It is possible that the notion of a surviving witness was prompted by a

47
Swamacross and lived to carry
(As he, the manuscripthe cherished)
To Rat-land home his commentary:
Which was, “ At the firstshrill notes of the pipe,
“I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,
“And putting apples, wondrous ripe,
“Into a cider-press’s gripe.
“And a moving away of pickle-tub-boards,
“And a leaving ajar of conserve=cupboards,
“And a drawing of corks of train=oil-flasks,
“And a breaking of hoops of butter-casks:
“And it seemed as if a voice
“(Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery
“Is breathed) called out’ Oh rats, rejoice!
“The world is grown to one vastdrysaltery!
“So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!”
“And just as a bulky sugar-puncheon,
All ready staved, like a great sun shone
“Glorious scarcean inch beforeme,
“Justas methought it said, ‘Come boreme!”
passage in Prosper Mérimée’s novel Chronique du temps de Charles IX. In the first
chapter a gypsy girl recounts the legend of the Pied Piper to a group of mercenary
soldiers on their way to Paris shortly before the bloody massacre of Huguenots on Saint
Bartholomew’s Eve in 1572. The recounting of the legend serves as an omen of disaster
even down to the detail that an old and portly rat almost escapes death like Admiral
Coligny, the leader of the Huguenots at the time of the massacre. Mérimée’s novel ’
could have suggested to Browning not only the idea of a single survivor but also the
Piper’s connection with wandering gypsies. The rat’s evocation of a material paradise
contrasts with the vision of the lame boy who is forced to remain behind in childless
Hamelin. His lyrical evocation of the biblical Millennium effects a parallelism grounded
in Browning’s theory of mankind’s moral progress from a state of being like animals to
one of spiritual fulfillment. This notion of progress or a higher state underlies Browning’s
“Caliban upon Setebos.”

48
- I found the Weser rolling o’er me.”
VIII.
You should have heard the Hamelin people
Ringing the bells till they rocked the steeple
“Go,” cried the Mayor, “and get long poles,
“Pokeout the nests and block up the holes!
“Consultwith carpenters and builders,
“”And leave in our town not even a trace
“Of the rats!” – when suddenly, up the face
Of the Piper perked in the market-place,
With a “First, if you please, my thousand guilders!”
IX.
A thousand guilders!The Mayor looked blue;
So did the Corporation too.
For council dinners made rare havoc
With Claret, Moselle, Vin-de-Grave, Hock;
And half the money would replenish
Their cellar’s biggestbutt with Rhenish.
To pay the sumto a wandering fellow 28
With a gypsy coat of red and yellow!
“Beside,” said the Mayor with a knowing wink,
“Our business was doneat the river’s brink;
“We saw with our eyes the vermin sink,
“And what’s dead can’t come to life, I think.29
28 In the mind of the Mayor of Hamelin the word “wandering” carries a derogatory force
but the reader notes the irony of the word’s overall effect as it reinforces the Piper’s
associations with positive aspects of wandering in connection with pilgrims, minstrels
and poets.
29 In the context of the narrated events in the story of the Pied Piper the Mayor’s words
reveal his confidence that there will be no more trouble coming from the drowned rats.
In a poem, as Jurij Tynjanov points out, words can be released from the normal

49
“So, friend, we’re not the folks to shrink
“Fromthe duty of giving you something to drink,
“And a matter of money to put in your poke:
“But as for the guilders, whatwe spoke
“Of them, as you well know, was in joke:
“Beside, our losses have made us thrifty,
“A thousand guilders!Come, take fifty!”
X.
The Piper’s face fell, and he cried,
“No trifling! I can’t wait, beside!
“I’vepromised to visit by dinner-time
“Bagdad, and accept the prime
“Of the Head-Cook’s pottage, all he’s rich in, 30
“For having left, in the Caliph’s kitchen,
“Of a nest of scorpions no survivor:
With him I proved no bargain-driver,
“With you, don’t think I’ll bate a stiver!
“and folks who put me in a passion
“May find me pipe after a different fashion.”
XI.
“How!” cried the Mayor, “d’yethink I brook
“Being worsetreated than a Cook?
“Insulted by a lazy ribald
“With an idle pipe and vesturepiebald?
“You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst,
“Blow your pipe there till you burst!”
constriction of a context and thus gain a universal validity. Thus these words may reflect
Browning’s life-long concern with the theme of the Resurrection.
30 Genesis 25.33.

50
XII.
Once morehe stept into the street,
And to his lips again
Laid his long pipe of smooth straightcane;
And ere he blew three notes such sweet
Soft notes as yet musician’s cunning
Never gavethe enraptured air
There was a rustling that seemed like a bustling
Of merry crowds jostling at pitching and hustling,
Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering,
Little hands clapping and little tongues chattering,
And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering,
Out came the children running,
All the little boys and girls,
With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,
And sparkling eyes, and teeth like pearls,
Tripping and skipping, run merrily after
The wonderfulmusic with shouting and laughter.
-
XIII.
The Mayor was dumb, and the Council stood
As if they werechanged into blocks of wood.
Unable to movea step, or cry
To the children merrily skipping by,
- Could only follow with the eye
That joyous crowd atthe Piper’s back.
But how the Mayor was on the rack,
And the wretched Council’s bosoms beat,
As the Piper turned from South to West,
And to Koppelberg Hill his steps addressed,
And after him the children pressed;
Great was the joy in every breast.

51
“He never can cross that mighty top! 31
“He’s forced to let his piping drop,
“And we shall see our children stop!’
When. Lo, as they reached the mountain-side,
A wondrous portalopened wide,
As if a cavern was suddenly hollowed;
And the Piper advanced and the children followed,
And when all were in to the very last,
The door in the mountain-sideshutfast.
Did I say all! No! Onewas lame,
And could not dance the whole of the way;
Andin after years, if you would blame
His sadness, hewas used to say, -
“It’s dullin our town sincemy playmates left!
!I can’t forgetthat I’mbereft
“Of all the pleasant sights they see,
“Which the Piper also promised me.
“For he led us, he said, to a joyous land 32
31 In strophes XXXIV, XXXV and XXXVI of "By the Fire-Side" in Men and Women,
there are the following occurrences of "cross": "Silent the crumbling bridge we cross."
(166) "The cross is down, the altar bare," (174) "We stoop and look in through the grate,/
See the little porch and rustic door,/ Read duly the dead builder's date; / Then cross the
bridge that we crossed before" (176- 179). In terms used by the Russian Formalist Jurij
Tynjanov the noticeable repetition of a word within the same passage, however irksome
this may be in nonliterary language, implies that underlying individual occurrences there
is a factor he describes as "lexical unity" centred in "the word" itself, transcending any
context. This almost mystical supposition is uncannily like
the second hermeneutic principle of traditional rabbinical exegesis.
32 The association of the separate words “promised” and “land” yields the notion of the
Promised Land which binds together various elements of the poem based on the
resemblance of plague-ridden locations to the archetype of plague-ridden Egypt. I recall
that Browning’s poems entitled “Pisgah Sights I” and “II” reveal a deep sympathy for
Moses as one who experiences a vision of the Promised Land knowing that he is
debarred from entering it –just like the lame child in “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.”

52
“Joining the town and justat hand,
“Where waters gushed and fruit-trees grew,
And flowers putforth a farer hue,
And everything was strangeand new;
“The sparrows werebrighter than peacocks here,
And their dogs outran our fallow deer,
“And honey-bees had lost their stings33,
“And horses wereborn with eagles’ wings;
“And just as I became assured
“My lame foot would be speedily cured,
“The music stopped and I stood still.
“And found myself outside the hill,
“Left alone againstmy will,
“To go now limping as before
“And never hear of that country more.!”
XIV.
Alas, alas for Hamelin!
There came into many a burgher’s pate
A text which says thatheaven’s gate
Opes to the rich at as easy rate
As the needle’s eye takes the camel in! 34
The Mayor sent East, West, North and South,
To offer the Piper, by word of mouth,
Wherever it was men’s lot to find him,
Silver and gold to his heart’s content.
If he’s only return the way he went,
33 The idyllic vision of the lame child evokes the Messianic world described by the
prophet Isaiah when all creatures will live in harmony. The reference to the honey could
point to the land that flows with milk and honey while the reference to the loss of the
power to sting could allude to the conquest of death ascribed to divine atonement in the
Christian sense. See 1 Corinthians 15. 55
34 Matthew 19. 24.

53
And bring the children behind him.
But when they saw ‘twas a lost endeavor,
And Piper and dancers were gone for ever,
They made a decree that lawyers never
Should think their records dated duly
If, after the day of the month and the year,
These words did not as well appear,
“And so long after whathappened here
“On the twenty-second of July, 35
“Thirteen hundred and seventy-six:”
And the better in the memory to fix
The place of the children’s last retreat,
They called it, the Pied Piper’s Street-
Where any one playing a pipe or a tabor,
Was surefor the future to lose his labour.
Nor suffered they hostelry or tavern
To shock with mirth a street so solemn;
But opposite the place of the cavern
They wrotea story on a column,
And on the great church-window painted
The same, to make the world acquainted
How the children werestolen away,
And there it stands to this very day,
And I mustnot omit to say
That in Transylvania there’s a tribe
35 The twenty-second of July marks the Day of Saint Mary Magdalene, the first person
to meet Jesus on Easter Sunday according to Saint John’s Gospel. This date was given in
an account of the Pied Piper legend during the sixteenth century and in Richard
Verstegan’s “Pide Piper” but the first versions of the legend assign another saints’ day to
the arrival of the Piper in Hamelin, namely the 26th of June, the Day of Saint John and
Saint Paul. On the negative side, Prosper Mérimée in his novel Chronique du temps de
Charles IX casts the Piper as the devil in person and as omen of the massacre of
Huguenots on Saint Bartholomew’s Eve in1572.

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