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 r…