This week’s choice is inspired by the story of Sennacherib which I have been listening to on the audiobook version of “A History of the World in 100 Objects”.
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
Lord Byron (1788—1824)
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.
Poem 457. The Destruction of Sennacherib
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!
This poem is Byron’s adaptation of the story told in the Bible about the Assyrian king’s abortive siege of Jerusalem in 701 BC. According to Wikipedia, the story as adapted by the poet is told in 2 Kings 18–19 and Isaiah 36–37 and the Assyrian account appears in Sennacherib’s Prism.
According to the Tanakh (the Jewish Bible), Hezekiah the king of Judah paid a huge tribute to try to persuade Sennacherib to withdraw but the Assyrian king marched his army on Jerusalem anyway. According to Isaiah, the siege was broken when an angel killed 185,000 Assyrian soldiers overnight—a huge number for the era and some believe that this number was inflated to emphasise the power of God.
Byron re-tells the Biblical story, bringing the colours of the Assyrian horde to life and graphically depicting the devastation wrought on Sennacherib’s army by the avenging angel. We can imagine the savage beauty of the Assyrian army as Byron saw it: Sennacherib’s army descends on the city “like the wolf on the fold”, prepared to ravage and pillage but Byron also praises the sheen of their weapons, likening the sparkling of their spears to “stars on the sea” (of Galilee). This reminds me of Simon Armitage’s metaphor of last week:
And without enlargement they take on the scale
Simon Armitage, I feel I am at the end of my tether.
of last night’s stars in Malham Tarn,
inching upstream as the universe tilted, mirrored
till we burst their colours with a fistful of cinders.
In the first couplet of the second stanza, the army’s banners are likened to the multitudes of leaves in a forest at mid-summer but only so that in the next couplet they can be shown resembling the “withered and strown” detritus left by autumn’s gales.
Byron describes the Angel of Death circling over the sleeping Assyrians and breathing some miasmic vapour on them that kills both soldiers and their mounts so that “there lay the steed with his nostril all wide” and “there lay the rider distorted and pale”.
Not only are living creatures decimated by this curse but even their mail that shone so brightly the day before is spotted with rust. The camp is silent: no trumpets sound and the banners flap idly in the breeze.
In Ashur (the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire) however, the widows of the dead lament their losses and the priests are humbled, their idols of Baal lying broken in the dust. This mighty army though completely untouched by any mortal is nonetheless no more powerful than meltwater against the power of the Lord.
I like it because it tells the story so well and the descriptions are so good: we are shown the foam blown from the horses’ mouths as they struggled for breath, the camp of the Assyrians peopled only by corpses and the description of the living army as “Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green” and after their destruction, “Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown”.
The 21st episode of “A History of the World in 100 Objects” is about the Lachish Reliefs, which commemorate Sennacherib’s victory over Lachish which immediately preceded the attack on Jerusalem.
I have chosen Tom Hollander’s performance of the poem on Zsuzsanna Uhlik’s YouTube channel.