Poetry and Poetics–Lit 204

On my first read it was difficult to pinpoint a meaning of this poem, but giving a closer look at the final lines I saw the comparison between performing this great swimming feat for glory as opposed to for love. After mentioning this difference in reasoning for the swim, he says “For he was drown’d and I’ve the ague,” or that Leander drowned doing this swim and that the speaker got sick from it. I could read this one of two ways, either that the speaker is a better swimmer than the hero of Greek myth which is an idea that fits with Lord Byron’s love of self promotion, or that since both drowning and getting sick is bad, that maybe both of these motivations are silly since it did not end up going well for Leander or for the speaker.

I chose to write about this poem because it carried a tone of self deprecating humor and is also rife with brags which I found quite funny. The poem opens with talking about this great athletic feat done in myths, which the speaker also completed so the speaker makes it known from the very title like “hey, I am now writing this poem after I did this cool thing.” This tone of self promotion was supported by the meter of the poem with five quatrains at iambic tetrameter, which carries that epic feel to it.

Lord Byron’s “Written After Swimming From Sestos to Abydos” asks which fate is worse: to die for love or live without glory. Byron himself swam across the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles), and compares his own swim to that of mythic Leander, who “swam for Love, as I for Glory; / ‘Twere hard to say who fared the best” (16-17)¹. Byron references Leander of Greek myth: Leander, from the city of Abydos, had fallen in love with the priestess Hero of Sestos. He as a foreigner could not wed the city’s priestess, so asked Hero to light a lamp from her tower on the shore. He swam across the strait of Hellespont to meet her for many nights, but when winter came, wind snuffed out the lamp, and Leander drowned in rough seas. Hero, in her grief, jumped from her tower to ultimately die as well².

The poem contrasts Byron’s swim with Leander’s to illustrate how modern times lack the vigor and vibrancy of days long gone. Referring to himself as “me, degenerate modern wretch,” Byron differentiates between his own swim during “the genial month of May,” and Leander’s journey “in the month of dark December” (9, 10, 1). In order to see his love, Leander risks his life and eventually pays a fatal price. Byron seems to chase thrills and grand achievements, as he ventures out for an exhilarating swim in mild springtime: “My dripping limbs I faintly stretch, / And think I’ve done a feat today” (10-12). He scoffs at his own perception, that his swim could be considered impressive when Leander’s deadly crossing exists. 

He implies that death may not be the worst of fates, explaining that Leander “lost his labour, I my jest; / For he was drown’d and I’ve the ague” (19-20). He levels the severity of Leander’s drowning with his own ague. The waters of Hellespont set their violent touch on both Leander and Byron. While Leander perishes in an attempt at reunion with his love, Byron too looks the possibility of death in the eye– but for no greater reason than for pursuing his own selfish renown. Through the lens of epic love and mythology, Byron suggests that in his contemporary era, people have lost the will to make meaningful sacrifices. He envies the noble death Leander meets, in comparison to the sickened consequences of his own ego that he’s forced to live with.

¹ History.com Editors. “Lord Byron Swims Across Tumultuous Hellespont Strait in Turkey.” HISTORY. April 30, 2021. Web. October 4, 2023. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/lord-byron-swims-the-hellespont.

² Norwood, Frances. “Hero and Leander.” Phoenix, vol. 4, no. 1, 1950, pp. 9–20. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1086873. Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.

Lord Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib” describes Sennacherib (the Assyrian king) and his army as they besieged Jerusalem in 701 B.C.E., only to be wiped out by a vicious plague. The poem is composed of six quatrains, each with two rhyming couplets (AABB rhyme scheme), and is written in anapestic tetrameter. I found that the strict form and meter initially supported the sense of power and command held by the Assyrian army, and overall served to make the events described feel inevitable and purposeful. The most blatant and likely intentional way this occurs is via the meter, which imitates galloping horses. Lord Byron’s diction in the first stanza also added to the powerful image of the Assyrian army, describing the soldiers as “gleaming in purple and gold” (2), and using similes to compare the king to “the wolf on the fold” (1) and the soldiers’ spears to “stars on the sea” (3). This quatrain sets up the demise of the Assyrians nicely, in that having them fall from a position of power to death makes their death significantly more impactful to the reader.

This poem has heavy religious themes, and ultimately implies that the plague was sent by “the Angel of Death” (9) and that the Lord has taken action against the Assyrians: “And the might of [Sennacherib], unsmote by the sword, / Hath melted like snow in the glance of the lord!” (23-24). With this very clear implication and the fact that this poem was written 2500 years after the events it describes, I was wondering what Lord Byron’s intended audience was. My best guess is that it was intended to inspire pride and faith, and does so by suggesting that even those that appear all-powerful can be dealt with seemingly effortlessly by divine beings if they have the wrong intentions, as Lord Byron describes here. To me this poem reads as very solid and pointed. I didn’t feel it left as much ambiguity as much of what we’ve read, but it still managed to craft an impactful and substantive message.

I found the destruction of Sennacherib to be interesting because I think Byron was able to perfectly capture the unsettling nature of the Biblical story of the attempted siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib through the structure, form, and content of this poem. The poem is in anapestic meter, which causes it to read in a very rhythmic manner, almost like the beating of military drums or a march. In the first few lines of the poem about the Assyrian army marching into Jerusalem — “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold / And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold” (lines 1, 2) — the meter emphasizes the feeling of marching soldiers and impending destruction. As the poem goes on, it includes disturbing images of death, such as “the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill” (line 11), and there is an air of sheer destruction and loss; still, the meter and rhyming couplets stay consistent, seemingly marching through the tragedy as if it’s no big deal. To me, this captures the central tragedy of mortality: that even in the wake of tragic events, time marches forward. The ending line of the poem, “Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord,” furthers the idea of the insignificance of lives, with the description of the dead as “snow” that “melted” pinning them as small blips in the face of God (line 24). He explains earlier in the poem that the soldiers’ “hearts but once heaved, and forever grew still” when the “Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,” with the “heart’s” final “heave” signifying a last failed attempt to fight death, showing that divine power & fate are stronger than any human (lines 12, 9).

I am interested in what people think the author’s intended message & audience was behind this poem– I’m debating if he was especially sympathetic to the dead in this story, expressing lament for how suddenly and easily their lives were cut short, or if he was essentially delegitimizing their lives by arguing the insignificance of mortals under the rule of the much greater God.