The Destruction of Sennacherib — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
The Destruction of Sennacherib
The poems
What you need to know
Byron retells the Bible's story of the Assyrian army that came to besiege Jerusalem and was destroyed in one night by the Angel of Death, leaving its horses, riders and tents silent and its widows mourning.
How Byron's galloping rhythm, similes of the wolf, the stars, the leaves and the snow, and contrasts of splendour and ruin show an earthly army overthrown by the power of God.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'came down like the wolf on the fold', 'gleaming in purple and gold', 'like stars on the sea', 'Like the leaves of the forest', 'lay wither'd and strown', 'the Angel of Death spread his wings', 'for ever grew still', 'the rider distorted and pale', 'The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown', 'Hath melted like snow'.
Form: six quatrains of rhyming couplets in anapaestic tetrameter, whose galloping beat suggests horses' hooves, with lines that open on And, and a structure that moves from the army's glittering arrival to its ruin overnight.
Context: Lord Byron (1788–1824), the Romantic poet who died in Greece while supporting its war of independence; Hebrew Melodies (1815), lyrics written for music by Isaac Nathan; and the Bible's account (2 Kings and Isaiah) of the Assyrian king Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem in 701 BC, in which the Angel of the Lord strikes down 185,000 soldiers.
Compares well with: The Charge of the Light Brigade (an army of horsemen and a galloping rhythm), What Were They Like? (a whole people destroyed) and Exposure (death that comes from powers beyond human control).
