Today’s Poem: The Destruction of Sennacherib

Lord Byron conned into writing biblical verses

Peter Paul Rubens, The Defeat of Sennacherib, c. 1612 (Wikimedia Commons)

Are the widows of Ashur loud in their wail? Are the idols all broke in the temple of Baal? Has the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword, now melted like snow in the glance of the Lord?

One certainly hopes so, although one doesn’t expect George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) to be the poet saying so. Lord Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib” is one of the most-often reprinted poems — or at least used to be, back when knowledge of a standard and fairly anodyne set of nineteenth-century poetry was taken as a requirement for a basic general education. Yet it is hardly typical of Byron’s work.

The anapestic meter, for example — da da DUM, da da DUM — is loud, even for Byron, who loved three-syllable feet. What’s more, the biblical story is taken as given, with (very untypically for Byron) a narrator who never winks in irony. The poem is just six tetrameter quatrains in rhymed couplets: a fast-moving and memorable retelling of the 701 B.C. siege of Jerusalem by the Assyrians under King Sennacherib, the tale told in 2 Kings 18–19 and Isaiah 36–37, rendered in galloping anapests like cavalry charging. 

The difference of this from his other work may be that Byron wrote the poem as part of his 1815 book Hebrew Melodies. It’s a wonderful collection, including such other well-known work as “She walks in beauty, like the night” — made curious by the fact that the book was born from meeting a musical con man.

It’s hard to know what else to call Isaac Nathan (c. 1791–1864). A talented arranger, he came to Byron with a set of melodies he claimed were recreated from music once played in the Temple at Jerusalem, destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70. The melodies weren’t authentic, of course, but the poet found Nathan a charming rogue. Byron gave the composer a few older poems to set to the supposedly ancient melodies and wrote new verses based on biblical topics, among them “The Destruction of Sennacherib.”

Thomas Phillips, Lord Byron in Albanian dress, c. 1835 (Wikimedia Commons)

Something in the exercise seems to have released Byron from his ironic voice, as the fun of composition overflows in Byron’s free-flowing alliteration, exuberant metaphors, and bouncy rhythm: “And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword, / Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!”

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The Destruction of Sennacherib

by Lord Byron

     The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

     Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

     For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

     And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

     And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

     And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

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