Authors are sometimes best known for a work that is not typical of their writing, and today’s Poem of the Day may be an example. “The Destruction of Sennacherib” is — or at least used to be, back when knowledge of a standard and fairly anodyne set of 19th-century poetry was taken as a requirement for basic general education — one of the most reprinted of the poems by George Gordon Byron (1788–1824). Yet it not typical of Lord Byron’s work, which has been featured here in The New York Sun with a portion of his epic “Mazeppa,” along with “Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos” and “Stanzas for Music.”

The anapestic meter of “The Destruction of Sennacherib” — da da DUM, da da DUM — is loud, even for Byron, who loved three-syllable feet. The biblical story is taken at face value. And, very untypically for Byron, the narrator never winks in irony. Instead, we have 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 (as described in 2 Kings 18–19 and Isaiah 36–37), rendered in galloping anapests like cavalry charging at the city. 

The cause of the difference from his other work may be that Byron wrote the poem as part of his 1815 collection “Hebrew Melodies.” Isaac Nathan (c. 1791–1864) was a musical con man — it’s hard to know what else to call him — and 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 70 A.D. The melodies weren’t authentic, of course, but Byron found Nathan a charming rogue, even while he recognized the type. Byron gave the composer a few older poems to set to the supposedly ancient music and wrote new verses based on biblical topics, among them “The Destruction of Sennacherib.”

Something in the exercise seems to have released Byron from his usual ironic voice, and the fun of composition overflows the story 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!”

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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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.