POESÍA
INGLESA DE LOS SIGLOS XIX Y XX
George Gordon Lord Byron (1788 - 1824)
THE DESTRUCTION OF SENNACHERIB; Hebrew Melodies, 1815
1 The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
2 And his cohorts were
gleaming in purple and gold;
3 And the sheen of their
spears was like stars on the sea,
4 When the blue wave rolls
nightly on deep
5 Like the leaves of the
forest when Summer is green,
6 That host with their banners
at sunset were seen:
7 Like the leaves of the
forest when Autumn hath blown,
8 That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.
9 For the Angel of Death
spread his wings on the blast,
10 And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
11 And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
12 And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew
still!
13 And there lay the steed with his nostril all
wide,
14 But through it there rolled not the breath of his
pride;
15 And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
16 And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.
17 And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
18 With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
19 And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
20 The lances unlifted, the
trumpet unblown.
21 And the widows of Ashur
are loud in their wail,
22 And the idols are broke in the
23 And the might of the Gentile, unsmote
by the sword,
24 Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!
THE DESTRUCTION OF SENNACHERIB; Hebrew Melodies, 1815
http://englishhistory.net/byron/poems/destruct.html
The poem describes a battle in Sennacherib, as the
title says. The poem is divided in six stanzas with four lines in each one. The
rhyme is aabb.
The first stanza presents us not a usual Asyrian but a special one, as we can read in the very first
words in the poem: “the Asyrian”, where this
character is emphasized by the article “the”. The presentation of that man
comes highlighted by shining adjectives as gleaming (line 2), gold (l. 2),
sheen (l. 3) and stars (l. 3), which evokes the nobility and richness of that
man and the clothes used by his soldiers. All these lines tell the reader that
the soldiers are prepared for the battle, and the author prepares the reader
psychologically for the battle too. The Asyrian is sorrounded by his cohorts because he is the principal
character and in which this stanza is focused. The wolf in the first verse
indicates the personality or the present state of the Asyrian,
who comes furious to the setting. This is also a metaphor which tells the
reader that the devastation was quick and very destructive.
In the second stanza Byron makes, from my point of
view, a comparison between how we find the landscape before and after the
passing of the Asyrian. Before he comes we find a
land full of enemies as trees full of leaves at Summer,
and after he has passed through the enemies we find a land as trees are in
Autumn, without leaves. That is to say, without enemies. This is a great metaphor
used by Byron: leaves are the soldiers. We can constantly find nature in these
two stanzas, we can see some examples in: wolf (l. 1), stars (l. 3), sea (l.
3), wave (l. 4), leaves (l. 5), forest (l. 5), Summer
(l. 5), Autumn (l. 7). From my point of view Byron uses nature to explain
feelings and uses it also to make things more understandable.
In lines 9 and 10 he describes how the Asyrian fights. He is a brilliant soldier and he kills
everyone who passes by his side, as if he were an “angel of death” (l. 9). He
also is described as spreading his wings on the blast in line 9, so he is a
beast, a monster for the enemies to fight him and he has no mercy. The eyes of
the people he kills are waxed, so the eyes and the faces of the dead are white
or uncoloured. Lines 11 and 12 describes the fear felt
by the enemies when the Asyrian was fighting.
In the fourth stanza Byron describes the defeat of the
enemies’ horses and how the animals lay as the riders do, as a sign of defeat
and humiliation in front of the victorious people. With this
horse laid in the field Byron represents the image of the defeat of the
enemies. It is the description of the landscape after the cruel battle.
In line 16 the poet uses again a natural phenomenon to compare what he is
describing: “cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf”.
All of the fifth stanza
evokes defeat’s symbols as the oxide in the mails of the riders, the empty
tents, the silence and the lances in the ground, clear signs of death and
suffered damages. Also the rider of the dead horse mentioned before he appears, and he is
also dead: “distorted and pale”. With all these images we, as readers, can
imagine how the field is after the battle and the desolate ground that battle
leaves when it is finished.
The last stanza also makes
reference to the defeated people. Now it is the widows who are shouting because
of the death of their husbands. Last line, where the poet again uses a natural
phenomenon (snow), it means that everybody follows the same path: death.
As a conclusion we might say that Byron uses an
adequate language to provide the reader with all the adjectives that describe
the passing of battles. In the end nothing remains but silence and death.