Hi James,
Quote:
Originally Posted by James Midgley
Your reading matches my intentions, as far as I can judge, pretty completely, which is very heartening. In these recent drafts I've tried to strengthen the nod to the Pied Piper tale (subtly). Is that coming over as a helpful lens?
|
To be honest, I didn't catch the Pied Piper nod, though I did pause on "piping", but took it to be either noises made by the people during or after the litany (who then piped down), or to the sound of the band. I didn't take the "gutterpipe which sang in a low tuba note their compressions" to be a literal musical pipe either, though I can now see it as a clue. I'd imagined a literal gutter pipe filled with rats, and the pipe either metaphorically sang, or amplified the sounds of them pushing together. I'd taken the barrel similarly, as filling/burgeoning with rats. Both seemed images of rats squeezing into things.
Anyway, maybe that's poor reading on my part. Maybe I should have put the pipe and the rats and children together, but I didn't. Now that you've flagged it, I can see the nod, of course, but I don't know that I can make too much sense of it.
OK, so in the story, the PP enchants the rats and children. So in the poem is he the one casting the fascist spell over the people, here, enchanting them that way? Though in the story it's only the children (and the rats first) he enchants, not the adults. So maybe not. Or are the children getting indoctrinated and that's the enchantment?
And if in the poem. the PP is luring away the rats (and possibly children) then who is calling the names and taking the one person away? Or is the PP doing both? Is the calling of names a form of piping? (Though in the poem the calling of names happens after the piping is over).
And in the story, the taking of the children is the consequence of the townsfolk not paying for the removal of the rats. Is this intended to be paralleled in poem somehow?
Also in the story, the PP takes the children, though this doesn't seem to happen in the poem, though perhaps I should take "when ... the piping died down" as, "after the children had been led away by the PP"? Or perhaps the idea is that we're at the point where the rats have been removed, but the PP has yet to come back for the children?
Anyway, these are the directions I tried going in to find a way to fit the PP story into what I'd originally taken to be the narrative of the poem, and I didn't really get anywhere. That could well be me, of course.
best,
Matt