The Pied Piper of Hamelin

The Pied Piper is described with particular attention to color. His name contain the word “pied,” which means made up of many colors, and the poem describes why this nickname is fitting: “His queer long coat from heel to head / [w]as half of yellow and half of red,” with “sharp blue eyes, each like a pin” (Lines 51-52, 54), and “[a] scarf of red and yellow stripe, / [t]o match with his coat of the self-same cheque” (Lines 75-76). Later, his eyes are described as “green and blue […] [l]ike a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled” (Lines 98-99). Until this character’s entrance, color has been notably absent in the descriptions of the town and its people. This suggests that the town of Hamelin was relatively monochrome and orderly, so the Piper presents a potentially threatening disruption. The bright colors he brings with him represent energy and uncontrolled chaos.

Later in the poem, this sense that a riot of color represents a richer life reappears in the left-behind child’s description of the place the Piper promised the children: a far-off place where “flowers put forth a fairer hue” (Line 237), and “[t]he sparrows were brighter than peacocks” (Line 239). The solitary boy’s longing for the nirvana the Piper described shows that the town’s children were lacking this outpouring of color in their own home; to them, it symbolizes something exotically appealing.