The Full Text of “The Destruction of Sennacherib”
1The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
2And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
3And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
4When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
5 Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
6That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
7Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
8That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.
9 For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
10And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
11And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
12And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!
13 And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
14But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
15And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
16And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.
17 And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
18With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
19And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
20The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.
21 And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
22And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
23And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
24Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!
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“The Destruction of Sennacherib” Introduction
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"The Destruction of Sennacherib" was published by Lord Byron in 1815 as part of the book Hebrew Melodies. The poem was written to be accompanied by music. The poem retells the biblical story of the siege of Jerusalem by the Assyrian king Sennacherib, during which, according to the Bible, God destroyed the entire Assyrian army in the middle of the night. The poem is notable for its sympathetic portrayal of the Jewish people during a historical period that was rife with anti-Semitism.
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“The Destruction of Sennacherib” Summary
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The Assyrian king Sennacherib marched towards Jerusalem like a wolf preparing to attack a flock of sheep. The soldiers in Sennacherib's army wore shining purple and gold armor. Their spears were as bright as the reflection of stars on the sea, such as on a wave of the biblical sea of Galilee.
The Assyrians appeared like green summer leaves in the distance, and their banners were visible at sunset. Yet the next day, they looked like autumn leaves scattered by the wind.
This is because the Angel of Death flew down on the wind to the sleeping army. The Angel breathed in the faces of the Assyrians. They died as they slept, and the next morning their eyes looked cold and dead. Their hearts beat once in resistance to the Angel of Death, then stopped forever.
One horse lay on the ground with wide nostrils—wide not because he was breathing fiercely and proudly like he normally did, but because he was dead. Foam from his dying breaths had gathered on the ground. It was as cold as the foam on ocean waves.
The horse's rider lay nearby, in a contorted pose and with deathly pale skin. Morning dew had gathered on his forehead, and his armor had already started to rust. No noise came from the armies' tents. There was no one to hold their banners or lift their spears or blow their trumpets.
In the Assyrian capital of Ashur, the wives of the dead Assyrian soldiers wept loudly for their husbands. The statues of their gods in the temple of their ruling god, Baal, had all been destroyed. The power of these non-Jewish people, untouched by any Earthly weapons, had completely disappeared. It was gone like snow that God melts in an instant.
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“The Destruction of Sennacherib” Themes
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God's Might
“The Destruction of Sennacherib” retells a biblical story in which God sends an Angel to destroy the Assyrian army that is about to lay siege to the holy city of Jerusalem. The mightiness of God could be considered the poem’s central, overarching theme. That power becomes all the more amplified because the poem never explicitly mentions God until the end of the poem, even though Byron borrowed the narrative from an Old Testament story. Instead, the poem catalogues the results of God’s power to terrifying effect, implicitly arguing that God's might goes without saying; that is, its results speak for themselves.
Just as the Assyrian army, led by Sennacherib, seems like it is about to achieve victory, God intervenes. Stanzas 3 to 5 function as a catalogue of the effects of this intervention, in order to emphasize God’s omnipotence, or unlimited power. Rather than representing power as loud and theatrical, the poem depicts it as silent and invisible, thus contrasting with the flashy Assyrian military. For instance, the “Angel of Death” doesn’t strike the Assyrian forces with lightning or fire, but simply “breathed in the face of the foe.” The Assyrians have a chance to put up a fight or even scream in terror, but rather, “their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!” In other words, they die on the spot. God’s might thus undermines military prowess. There is no battling against him or begging for mercy. The Assyrians, with their “lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown,” aren’t even given a chance.
The poem’s most forthright statement concerning God occurs only in the last stanza, yet it functions as a kind of moral for the poem as a whole. The narrator says, “the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the swords, / Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!” In other words, God’s power is so much greater than military might (represented here by “the swords”) that armies metaphorically “melt”—are handily destroyed—in the face of it. In addition to triumphing over powerful armies, the Hebrew God also triumphs over the “false” gods of other peoples. When the “idols”—images of these false gods—are destroyed “in the temple of Baal,” this means that God has also defeated the Assyrians’ gods. (Baal is a generic name used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to gods other than the God of the Hebrews). Similarly, “Ashur” refers both to the Assyrian capital and to their nation’s ruling deity. The words “the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail” thus represents the double nature of God’s victory: God has vanquished the earthly power of the Assyrians (their army and king), and he has also defeated their divine power (their gods Ashur and Baal).
The omnipotence of God thus throws the limits of human ability into stark relief. God effortlessly rewards the faithful and punishes their enemies, no matter that enemy’s earthly power, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop God.
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Death
While the poem’s descriptions of the destruction of Sennacherib’s army exemplify God’s might, they also detail the terror of mortality. More broadly, there’s a way to read this poem that secularizes it—in other words, it's possible to read it not as a necessarily religious poem, but as a work that details the sad inevitability of death.
Stanzas 2 through 5 supply the reader with images of death on a visceral level. They act as a kind of montage that essentially shows the ravages of time sped up to happen over the course of one night. That is, everything that happens to the Assyrian army here will eventually happen to all humans, whether through sudden deaths like the soldiers' or just the gradual process of aging. Stanza 2 invokes a seasonal metaphor to describe the destruction of Sennacherib’s army. While they start like the promising “leaves of the forest when Summer is green,” they end up “withered and strown” like Autumn leaves. Half a year passes in an instant, suggesting that all life is fleeting.
A similar effect occurs as the poem details the power of the “Angel of Death.” In line 18, for instance, there is “rust on the mail” (i.e. armor) of the soldiers, as if many years have passed, rather than just one night. Additionally, when the speaker says the dried foam near the horse’s mouth is as “cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf,” the poem once again employs a natural simile to describe death. These images emphasizing death as a natural force (even if the circumstances of death here are based on God). So, it makes sense to read this “Angel of Death” not just as an emissary sent by God to ravage this particular army, but also as a symbol for the force of death and time in the world in general.
The poem’s images also provoke sympathy and sadness. Although readers might be happy that the “villains” have been defeated, they can also recognize the immense suffering that death causes. Moreover, readers may also recognize their own future deaths in these images. Stanzas 3 to 5 offer ghastly close-ups of death, as when the “eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, / And their hearts but once heaved, and forever grew still!” Stanza 5 presents an even more vivid death: “And there lay the rider distorted and pale, / With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail.” Here, the poem is so close to the rider it can even see the droplets of dew that have formed on his head overnight.
Images like these have a complex tone. On one hand, it’s easy to feel triumphant over the rider whose “distorted” pose makes readers feel distant from him—readers stand above his crumpled, defeated body. On the other hand, “the dew on his brow” is such a gentle image that it might provoke sympathy, a desire to mop his brow and nurse him back to health, as if he were only sick. A similar moment occurs when “the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail” in line 22. Although this line represents total victory over the Assyrians, it showcases the saddest effects of such a victory. Women have lost their husbands and are grief-stricken. It becomes difficult to feel completely joyful over a victory that causes such suffering.
Through such relentlessly devastating imagery, the poem indirectly encourages readers to confront the chilling specter of death and accept that it comes for everyone sooner or later. It also suggests that death is always somewhat tragic, even when it's "foes" who are dying.
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Military Hubris
The biblical “lesson” that might be taken from the poem goes something like this: military strength and impressiveness do not guarantee success. Ultimately, God decides who wins and who loses. The glorious description of Sennacherib’s gleaming army thus becomes ironic, demonstrating hubris (excessive pride) rather than actual might.
The first stanza offers a description of Sennacherib’s impressive army that is undercut by the blunt final line of stanza 2: “That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.” The poem begins in medias res, in the middle of a war with the Assyrian army, just as they are about to invade Jerusalem: “The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold.” Beginning in such a way increases the level of excitement, and so heightens the seeming glory of the Assyrian army. This gets amplified even further by the anapestic meter (da da DUM | da da DUM), the galloping rhythm of which mimics the charging of the Assyrian horses.
The poem then offers a visual description of the army designed to evoke its might. The soldiers are “gleaming in purple and gold,” two colors associated with wealth and royalty. Their spears “gleam like stars on the sea, / When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.” Here, the poem describes the Assyrians on their weapons in a classical manner—it could have been plucked from an epic poem like The Iliad.
Yet rather than continuing on like The Iliad to describe a heroic and glorious battle scene, the poem suddenly veers into different territory. By the next morning all the Assyrians are dead, without a single fight having taken place. None of their military might gets put to use. Instead, it comes off as bluster, a lot of flashiness and pride, all of which proves useless in the end.
The final two lines of the poem evoke how easily such military might turns to hubris: “And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword, / Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!” The poem suggests that faith in military power, rather than faith in God, is ultimately hubris. The might of the Assyrians simply melts away in the face of God’s power; "swords" have no effect at all. This moment can also be read as more generally admonishing humans against believing they are indestructible. The poem's conclusion suggests that even the most powerful army can be struck down unexpectedly; they might fall ill, encounter insurmountable weather conditions, or be destroyed by other forces beyond their control.
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Triumph of the Downtrodden
Just as the poem condemns pride, it celebrates the humble and downtrodden. The poem implies the presence of the Hebrew people, rather than explicitly stating it. In this way, the precariousness of their position gets amplified, as if it’s too uncertain to even mention aloud. Here, the Hebrew people represent downtrodden people more generally, as their lives are totally dependent on what happens outside their city walls among the powerful. The poem argues, however, that this powerlessness can and should end, using God's deliverance of the Hebrews as evidence.
The only somewhat direct mention of the Hebrews comes in the first line, “The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold.” Here, “the fold” represents the Hebrews, depicted through a simile as helpless sheep being attacked by a wolf. After this moment, the poem goes on to describe the mightiness of the Assyrian forces, without mentioning the Hebrews again. It’s as if we can only understand the Hebrews in terms of the danger they face. The Assyrians are a resplendent army “gleaming in purple and gold,” while Hebrews humbly wait for the Lord to deliver them from this danger.
The poem's perspective immediately makes the Hebrews sympathetic. They’re the underdogs, while the Assyrians are a frightening menace. Historically speaking, this was a bold move for Byron to make: depicting Jewish people in a positive light elicited much criticism from Byron’s anti-semitic countrymen. Yet the poem does its best to win over anti-semitic readers. Since it emphasizes the dangers faced by the Hebrews, rather than describing the people themselves, it forces readers to put themselves in the Hebrews’ place. Readers become “the fold,” watching from behind the walls of Jerusalem as this terrifying army approaches.
In last stanza’s admonishment of military hubris and false idols, it implicitly praises the Hebrews, again without discussing them directly. They have been rewarded for their humility and faith. That is, their helplessness is an implied contrast to “the might of the Gentile” which “hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!” Again, the poem emphasizes that Hebrews don’t have the kind of might that militaristic forces like the Assyrians do. Instead, the humility and faith of the Hebrews mean that they will eventually triumph despite the meagerness of their earthly power. On a religious level, the poem thus advocates for faith over military or political power. More generally, though, the poem demonstrates a belief that the weak and oppressed will eventually be saved from their oppressors. Essentially, “The Destruction of Sennacherib” puts readers in the shoes of the downtrodden and argues that one day their unjust oppression will end.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Destruction of Sennacherib”
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Line 1
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
The poem begins in medias res (literally, "in the middle of things"). The Assyrian king Sennacherib has been leading his army on a campaign through the Kingdom of Judah and is about to lay siege to Jerusalem. The poem starts off with Sennacherib visible in the distance. Cutting through the lead-up to this event, the omniscient narrator instead chooses to place the reader at the start of what promises to be a climactic battle.
Starting a poem in medias res heightens its sense of tension and excitement. It sweeps the reader up in the military fervor of the impending battle. In contemporary terms, this is a very cinematic move: it's as if the poem opens with a shot of the charging Assyrian army. In more classical terms, this technique is borrowed from the epic tradition inherited from Greek and Latin poets. For instance, The Iliad begins in the middle of the Trojan war, rather than at the start of it. By beginning this way, the poem establishes certain expectations for what's going to happen. A reader in 1815, when this poem was published, would have been accustomed to poems invoking the epic tradition, and would have thus expected a series of scenes detailing military valor. The poem's meter further emphasizes the military feel of this first line. The anapestic tetrameter (da da DUM | da da DUM) has a galloping feel to it that mimics the charging of horses and lends the poem an irresistible momentum.
At the same time, a contemporary reader, familiar with the Christian tradition, would also have known what's about to happen: God destroys the Assyrian army; there are no scenes of military glory. Furthermore, by comparing Sennacherib to a wolf and the Hebrews to a "fold," or a group of sheep, the poem treats this less as an encounter between two armies and more as a potential slaughter. The comparison to sheep also calls to mind the Christian use of the word "flock" to describe a congregation. This simile, then, does a lot of work. It establishes the good guys (the Hebrews) and the bad guys (the Assyrians). It makes the reader root for the underdog (the Hebrews) and frames those underdogs in Christian terms. This latter move is a radical choice because these are not Christians but Jews, and Jews had experienced (and continued to experience) a long history of persecution and discrimination in England.
So, from the very first line, the poem messes with a Christian reader's expectations. One might expect epic battle scenes to come, except the astute reader knows that God is going to intervene before the battle gets underway. One might also expect a racist portrayal of Jews, given the culture in which this poem was written, but instead the Jews are talked about as if they were Christians.
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Line 2
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
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Lines 3-4
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee. -
Lines 5-8
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. -
Lines 9-12
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! -
Lines 13-16
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. -
Lines 17-20
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. -
Line 21
And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
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Lines 22-24
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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“The Destruction of Sennacherib” Symbols
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The Angel of Death
To put it bluntly, the Angel of Death symbolizes death. But within that symbolism, he also represents a variety of attitudes and experiences surrounding death.
Theologically, The Angel of Death represents God's unlimited power, and the ease with which God wields that power. That is, if God wants to wipe out an entire army, all he has to do is send an angel who will breathe in their faces, killing them instantly. This means that death is a built-in aspect of God's power and of God's essential identity.
Relatedly, the Angel of Death also represents nature. The poem spends a lot of energy using similes to link its events to images from the natural world (for instance, describing the fallen soldiers as fallen autumn leaves in line 7). The Angel of Death, whose means of killing is basically the same as what might be called "natural causes," thus represents how death is an integral element of nature—and by extension, human existence.
As a whole, the poem is a reckoning with death, and the Angel of Death acts as a symbol for the ways humans use religion and the natural world to come to terms with it.
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“The Destruction of Sennacherib” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Simile
"The Destruction of Sennacherib" makes extensive use of simile. As a whole, this gestures towards how classical epics like The Iliad use simile, thus linking the poem to a larger culture of war poetry and also appealing to readers who would have been familiar with classical literature.
Byron's poem focuses in particular on comparisons with the natural world. One reason for doing so is that this links human events with nature, thus suggesting that there's not that much difference between what happens to people and what happens to things in the natural world. For instance, the poem's final simile, in its closing two lines, states that "the might of the Gentile ... / Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!" Here, human decline gets compared to a late winter thaw, as if both are aspects of the same unavoidable process.
As in the above example, the poem's comparisons with the natural world also establish an equivalence between God and nature. Here, the poem implicitly compares the "glance" of God to the sun's warmth as it melts snow. In this way, although the events of the poem are extraordinary (God sends the Angel of Death to wipe out a whole army overnight), these natural similes serve to fit them into the ordinary course of the natural world. So, while the way the Assyrian soldiers died is remarkable, the simile emphasizes that the fact they died is unremarkable; after all, everyone will die sooner or later.
Relatedly, the first stanza's similes employ natural imagery that comes from the Bible. "[T]he fold" in line 1 follows the Christian tradition of referring to believers as sheep. And "Galilee" in line 4 refers to the Sea of Galilee, which figures prominently in the Bible (especially the New Testament). Both of these instances further link religion, nature, and human beings.
The similes in stanza two, which compare the destruction of the Assyrians to the transition in foliage between summer and fall, provide the poem's clearest statement of the parallel between human decline and natural rhythms. This theme is also expressed in the fourth stanza when the poem compares the foam at a dead horse's mouth to the spray of surf. Additionally, the sea imagery here picks up on the earlier reference to the Sea of Galilee, showing how all of these various natural processes are linked in an unbroken cycle.
All in all, these comparisons depict the interconnection between entities as varied as humans, animals, leaves, seas, snow, seasons, angels, and God. The human, the natural, and the divine all bleed into each other.
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Anaphora
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Caesura
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Allusion
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Climax (Figure of Speech)
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End-Stopped Line
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Parallelism
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Synecdoche
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Metonymy
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Assonance
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Consonance
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Alliteration
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Personification
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“The Destruction of Sennacherib” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Assyrian
- Fold
- Cohorts
- Galilee
- Host
- Morrow
- Strown
- Blast
- Waxed
- Chill
- Steed
- Ashur
- Baal
- Gentile
- Unsmote
Assyrian-
The Assyrian directly refers to Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, an ancient kingdom located in Mesopotamia.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Destruction of Sennacherib”
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Form
The poem is made up of six rhymed quatrains consisting of two rhymed couplets each. Quatrains are good for telling stories in clear and discrete sections because they allow events to appear in a carefully contained manner and to proceed logically. This form is consistent throughout the poem and easy to follow, allowing it almost to melt into the background so that the reader/listener can focus on the story being told.
The poem's quatrains subtly nod to ballad stanzas, which are a traditional narrative form in English poetry. Quatrains can also be contrasted with tercets (three-line stanzas, such as those Dante used in his own religious narrative poem, the Inferno.) Tercets tend to interlink, making it harder to separate events, and emphasizing the thought-process of the narrator. As such, they wouldn't really help the speaker tell the story here.
The poem's quatrains could also be compared with Byron's extensive of Spenserian stanzas in other narrative poems. Spenserian stanzas do create self-enclosed units, but because of their size—they're a whopping nine lines long—they tend to allow more events of an intricate nature to occur within them. Since this poem was written to be set to music, the quatrain structure helps maintain a degree of simplicity that is more suitable to be set to music.
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Meter
The poem employs an anapestic tetrameter, which goes:
da da DUM | da da DUM | da da DUM | da da DUM
Anapests are often thought of as mimicking galloping horses, which they do well at the beginning of the poem, as Sennacherib's forces charge towards Jerusalem. They also create a sense of excitement. One reason for this is that, in general, readers of English language poetry are used to iambic meters, which have two beats per foot in an unstressed-stressed rhythm. Anapests, however, have three, which can make them seem faster and more energetic, as if the reader has to fit three syllables into the space of two.
The poem only varies the meter in one way, which is sometimes by switching out an anapest for an iamb in its opening foot. The first time this occurs is in line 6:
That host- | with their ban | ners at sun | set were seen.
Using an iamb at the beginning of an anapestic line is a very subtle way to vary the meter. This is because:
- As mentioned above, readers are used to seeing iambs.
- Putting this tweak at the beginning allows the anapest to gallop uninterrupted afterwards, whereas putting the iamb in the middle of the line would have caused a stumbling effect and slowed down the poem.
Varying the poem in this manner helps prevent the poem from growing monotonous. In thinking about setting the poem to music, such moments create the opportunity for extending a note to account for the extra beat that would otherwise be lost.
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Rhyme Scheme
Each of the poem's stanzas is made up of two rhyming couplets. As such, it uses the following rhyme scheme:
AABBCCDDEEFFGGHHIIJJKKLL
One effect of this rhyme scheme is that the rhymes are close together, so they occupy a particularly vivid place in the reader's attention. The rhyme gives an immediate pay-off, rather than being delayed. This contributes to the sonic intensity of the poem, which is important because the poem was written to be accompanied by music. In fact, the nearness of the rhymes acts as a reminder that the reader should think of the poem, at least in part, as a song.
The immediacy of the AABB rhyme scheme also pairs well with the poem's use of anaphora and its end-stopped lines. It lends the poem what might almost be called a kind of bluntness. The poem isn't intricate and doesn't want to be. Rather, it relates this story in as simple and memorable a manner as possible, much as an oral story teller would.
An attentive reader might be reminded of heroic couplets (a rhymed pair of lines in iambic pentameter), which were the form of choice for translating epics into English. Just as the poem contains thematic gestures towards epic poetry, without ever becoming an epic itself, so too do its rhyme scheme and meter suggest epic poetry without fully verging into that territory.
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“The Destruction of Sennacherib” Speaker
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The speaker of the poem is best described as an omniscient narrator—that is, a narrator who knows everything about what's going on. This omniscience is on par (or almost on par) with that of God, so that the narrator gets to witness the Angel of Death descending to destroy the Assyrian forces. In this respect, the narrator is like that of a biblical story, capable of witnessing acts of God.
Also in keeping with this biblical feel, the narrator seems to sympathize with the Hebrews. One way to interpret the fact that the Hebrews are never mentioned explicitly is that the narrator is one of them, or at least is speaking from their point of view. In this reading, that Hebrews are never mentioned because the poem is looking out from their point of view towards the oncoming Assyrians.
That said, that narrator shouldn't be taken as an actual person present at the siege. Rather, the poem constructs a point of view capable of taking in all these events as if it were there. This point of view is capable of depicting death with sympathy, but also with distance. Furthermore, while basically representing a Jewish point of view, it does contain subtle references to Christianity.
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“The Destruction of Sennacherib” Setting
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The setting of the poem is Jerusalem in the 8th century BCE. Sennacherib, king of the Assyrians, is invading the Jewish kingdom of Judah, and approaches the capital city of Jerusalem. The main event of the poem, the massacre of Sennacherib's troops by the Angel of Death, takes place outside the city in the surrounding land. Then, at the end of the poem, the setting switches over to the Assyrian capital city, Ashur. Here, the poem depicts the ramifications of Sennacherib's defeat for the Assyrian people.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Destruction of Sennacherib”
Literary Context
Lord Byron was the most internationally famous of the English Romantic poets. His poetry exemplifies many of the qualities associated with English Romanticism, such as an interest in extreme states of emotion and personal liberty. The Romantics were also generally interested in the relationship between human beings and nature, a relationship that is explored in this poem as well.
"The Destruction of Sennacherib," as well as the book it comes from, Hebrew Melodies, might be thought of a successor to William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. In that earlier work, Wordsworth sought to use language and forms related to folk songs and ordinary people. Although Byron's poem isn't necessarily written in the language of a rural folk song, it does borrow some of the simplicity and formal charm of Wordsworth's poems.
All of the Romantic poets had an interest in narrative poems, and Byron was no exception. He became famous for his semi-autobiographical long poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and later his satiric poem Don Juan. “The Destruction of Sennacherib” comes before this latter poem, and is definitely closer in tone to the earlier work. It was written at the request of Isaac Nathan, a musicologist who claimed to have music that dated back to the Temple of Jerusalem (though this claim has proven to be totally false).
At any rate, Byron supplied a book’s worth of lyrics that, along with Nathan’s music, became the collection Hebrew Melodies. The book’s Jewish subject caused a degree of controversy, but many of the poems from it have gone on to have enduring popularity.
Historical Context
It's important to note that writing from a Jewish perspective was a controversial move in England at this time. Antisemitism has a long history in England, and Byron's poem earned him a great deal of criticism for his sympathetic portrayal of Jews. This decision, however, was in line with Byron's character and politics. In general, he supported social reform and anti-imperialism. In fact, he held these beliefs so strongly that he served in the Greek War of Independence, during which he died of a fever. This interest in helping the oppressed is at work in "The Destruction of Sennacherib" as well.
The historical context for the story that the poem narrates is a real event that happened around 701 BCE, when the Assyrian king Sennacherib lay siege to the city of Jerusalem. During the siege, the inhabits of the city cut off the water supply to the surrounding areas. Other than this, nothing is known about what destroyed the Assyrian forces that were poised to take the city. The Bible says God sent an Angel to destroy the army, while Assyrian sources don't mention the destruction at all. Given the mysterious context surrounding this story, Byron's poem can be read as a powerful attempt to visualize an event that is otherwise shrouded in mystery.
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More “The Destruction of Sennacherib” Resources
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External Resources
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Hebrew Melodies — More background information on "Hebrew Melodies," the collection in which the poem originally appeared, as well as selected photos of the music to which the poems were set.
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The Poem Out Loud — A reading of the poem on YouTube.
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Historical Background — Useful historical information on the siege of Jerusalem that inspired the biblical story this poem is based on.
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The Poem Set to Music — A choral adaptation of Byron's poem by the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky.
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A Biography of Byron — An extensive biography of Byron from Britannica.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Lord Byron
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