Poet Lore (Volume 12) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BROWNING'S FOLK POEMS: A STUDY PROGRAMME. [Concluded from End-Year Number.] III. Topic for Paper, Classwork, or Private Study.?The Folk-lore of these Poems. Of all these poems the only one that is purely imaginary is The Boy and the Angel.' For suggestions as to the sources of the others, see Notes to Camberwell Browning as given above. Observe the differences in the nature of the stories. Some tell only of possible events, others have imaginative elements in them. Of the imaginative stories is there any more probable than another ? What are the imaginative elements in each of the stories and what is their source? In 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin ' the imaginative element is, of course, the effect of the piper's music on the rats and then upon the children. What stories in mythology does this remind you of, and what is the explanation of such stories ? See ' Hymn to Hermes,' translated by Shelley, also Mercury, Arion, Orpheus, in Gayley's 'Classic Myths in English Literature.' These are myths of the wind as a musician; Hermes, or the wind, is also the leader of souls to Hades after death. There are also many traces in folk-stories of a belief in the idea that the soul escaped from the body in the form of some little animal, a mouse or a bird. The story of the ' Pied Piper' combines all these mythical elements in a setting of reality. In the story of ' Gold Hair,' it seems so improbable that the girl should be able to hide the gold coins in her hair that this story may be said to have an imaginative element in it, also. In ' The Cardinal and the Dog ' the big black dog might be explained as a subjective hallucination due to a diseased state of the mind, but in a superstitious age such appearances of a disordered brain were considered veritable visions from the other wor...