“The Pied Piper” is a narrative poem. It is made up of 15 stanzas of varying lengths, totaling 297 lines. Most of the poem is told in third-person, as the speaker recounts historical events to listeners. However, in the penultimate stanza, the poem switches to the first-person, and the speaker moves the narrative to the present day.

The poem doesn’t follow a set metrical structure; instead, it orders its line patterns and line breaks to achieve the best dramatic effect. For example, Line 10 consists of only one syllable: “Rats!” Most of the full-length lines are written in accentual meter, meaning the lines have a set number of stressed syllables (in this case, four per line) but the stressed syllables aren’t organized into a particular order or pattern.

The rhyme scheme, likewise, is left intentionally erratic. As a children’s poem, “The Pied Piper” celebrates the flexibility of language through amusing rhymes (which occasionally need to be mispronounced to achieve the rhyme’s full effect). The speaker delights in verbose and antiquated words, rhyming “vermin” and “ermine” (Lines 25, 27) and “psaltery” and “drysaltery” (Lines 130, 132). The

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