The Destruction of Sennacherib — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
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 a single night by the Angel of Death, leaving its horses and riders dead, its tents silent and its widows mourning.
How Byron's galloping rhythm, rhyming couplets, similes of the wolf, the stars, the leaves and the snow, and the contrast 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: 'The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold', 'gleaming in purple and gold', 'like stars on the sea', 'Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green', 'lay withered and strown', 'the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast', 'for ever grew still', 'the rider distorted and pale', 'The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown', 'Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord'.
Form: six quatrains of rhyming couplets in anapaestic tetrameter, two light beats then a stressed one, four times a line, like galloping hooves; many lines open with And, and the poem moves from the army's glittering arrival to its ruin in a single night.
Context: Lord Byron (1788–1824), the Romantic poet who became famous overnight with Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, left England in 1816 and died while supporting the Greek fight for independence; Hebrew Melodies (1815), poems on Bible subjects written to be sung to Jewish sacred melodies arranged by Isaac Nathan; and 2 Kings 19, where the angel of the Lord strikes the camp of the Assyrian king Sennacherib in one night and he returns to Nineveh.
OCR's text opens 'like the wolf', as corrected in 2020.
Links within the cluster: What Were They Like? (a whole people destroyed), Songs for the People (the sounds of war set against a heavenly music), Papa-T (an old poem of battle recited) and We Lived Happily during the War (the threat of destruction).
An unseen poem paired with it might share an army's pride and fall, a battle told as a story, or a power greater than human armies.
Examiners in 2024 and 2025 found it an easy way into writing about metre in part (b): the anapaestic beat as hooves that never stop, and full rhyme set against half-rhyme, sword and Lord against Baal and wail.
OCR's question on this cluster has two parts. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a named poem from the cluster, printed on the paper, with an unseen poem on a linked theme, and rewards analysis of language, form and structure (AO2) most, then your response (AO1); an answer on only one of the two poems cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores one other poem from the same cluster that you choose, from memory, with AO1 and AO2 equally weighted; a poem from a different cluster means only the higher of your two marks counts. Neither part marks context: use it only where it explains a reading. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
