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.