In 1815 George Gordon, Lord Byron wrote a poem about the biblical story of Sennacherib, whose destruction is related in the nineteenth chapter of the Second Book of Kings. Sennacherib was the emperor of Assyria from 705 to 681 b.c.e. In 701 b.c.e., his forces laid siege to Jerusalem. The Assyrians had conquered the entire Near East except for tiny Judah, the last remaining Israelite kingdom, which was militarily weak. Few thought it possible that their walled capital city, Jerusalem, could hold out long against such forceful Assyrian military might. The Assyrians were a regimented and militaristic society, and aggressiveness was their trademark. Byron’s comparison of them to “wol[ves] on the fold” grasps the animal intensity characteristic of their assaults. “Fold” means sheepfold, or pen of sheep; “wolf on the fold,” an image itself derived from the Bible, refers to an evil predator among the innocent. In Byron’s poem, the Assyrians are arrayed with fine clothing and mighty weaponry. Yet in the second stanza readers are told that all these material goods have not availed them. The division between the two couplets in this stanza is abrupt. At one moment, the Assyrians resemble the green of the summer: beautiful, prosperous, with nature itself on their side. At the next moment, they are like the withered leaves of autumn, drained of life and blown in many ways.
Author
George Gordon Byron (invariably known as Lord Byron), later Noel, 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale FRS was a British poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Amongst Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential, both in the English-speaking world and beyond. Byron's notabilty rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured upper-class living, numerous love affairs, debts, and separation. He was notably described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". Byron served as a regional leader of Italy's revolutionary organization, the Carbonari, in its struggle against Austria. He later travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died from a fever contracted while in Messolonghi in Greece.
