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Faculty of Education Third Grade
Department of English Second Term (June 2011)
1.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) believed firmly in the classical idea that poetry is an imitation of nature, having as its ends instruction and delight. The nature that the poet imitates, however, should be "general nature." Explain what Johnson means by "general nature," and apply this belief to six of the Neo-Classical poems you have studied this term? (Time limit is 80 minutes)
2.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's major poems turn on problems of self-esteem and identity.
Exploring states of isolation and ineffectuality, they test strategies to overcome weakness without asserting its antithesis—that is a powerful self, secure in its own thoughts and utterances. This is evident in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," which establishes a structural pattern for the conversation poems as a group. Explicate that structural pattern in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison"? (Time limit is 30 minutes)
3.
Draw a comparison between William Collins' poem "Ode to Evening" and John Keats's poem "When I Have Fears" to show the difference in poetic technique and vision between both poets?
(Time limit is 40 minutes)
4.
Discuss the idea of poetic creativity in Byron's poem "The Destruction of Sennacherib"?
(Time limit is 30 minutes)
Good Luck
Mohammad Badr AlDeen Al-Hussini Hassan Mansour
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Question One:
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) believed firmly in the classical idea that poetry is an imitation of nature, having as its ends instruction and delight. The nature that the poet imitates, however, should be "general nature." Explain what Johnson means by "general nature," and apply this belief to six of the Neo-Classical poems you have studied this term?
Answer:
Samuel Johnson believed firmly in the classical idea that poetry is an imitation of nature, having as its ends instruction and delight. The nature that the poet imitates, however, should be "general nature." He states: "Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature." By general nature, Johnson means what is universal and permanent, that is, what is true for all people in all ages. In Rasselas , the philosopher Imlac explains:
The business of a poet [...] is to examine, not the individual, but the species. [...]. He is to exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features, as recall the original to every mind [...]. [He] must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths, which will always be the same.
By imitating general nature, the poet instructs and delights the audience. Johnson believed that instruction was the more important end of poetry, but he realized that poetry could best instruct by delighting. Hence, he repeatedly makes such statements as that "the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing." Thus, Johnson believed that poetry is an imitation of general nature with the purpose of instructing and delighting. As the poet was the spokesman for his age and his subject was man as a social creature, the poet's duty, Johnson felt, was to imitate nature and life, not to follow critical rules. This led to the wake of satirists such as Swift and Pope who attacked the frivolity of polite society, the corruption of politics, and false values in all the arts. The zeal for truth and virtue blazes through many lines, and the warmth of their compassion for the poor, the sick, the mistreated, and the aged glows through many others. They were obsessed by the precariousness of intellect and of civilization, by the threat of fools and bores and pedants, by the fear of universal darkness burying all. Thus, they became moral crusaders for truth, virtue, and intelligence.
They believed in an ancient state of purity which man could not re-create.
The desire of Johnson, in "On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet," to reach out to as many men and women as possible, not just to a privileged few, can be seen in Johnson's firm commitment to poetic tradition. In practical terms, this means Johnson commits himself to rendering Levet's story as "universal" in scope as possible, in the hope that it might function for all his readers as a moral lesson—indeed, as precisely the kind of biblical parable of which Johnson was so fond. Johnson searches out the most universal, the most "human" concerns—concerns all readers are likely to have shared at some time in their lives. He speaks of life and death, of human cares and anguish, of human virtues and
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accomplishments, of faith, duty, and compassion, and—though the word is never mentioned—of love.
What Johnson saw—or hoped to see—in the parable of Levet's life was the possibility of God's mercy and the hope of heaven. Levet's humble pilgrimage through life was for Johnson a meaningful example that was able to bolster his faith and bring him spiritual comfort. As readers see Levet work his way day after day through the London slums, selflessly dispensing his "useful care," they see he is walking a "narrow round" that is actually an upward spiral: When death "frees" his soul, it is called home "the nearest way." One should also sense, throughout the poem, that it is more than merely a lament of the passing of a friend: it is a comment on the whole human situation. Like so much of
Johnson's writing, this poem is a fierce protest against the inhumanity of man to man.
In "Eloisa to Abelard," Pope used the verse epistle form not only to explore the conflicting desires and psychological torment of his heroine, but also to convey the symmetry and balance central to neoclassical art. Describing the conflict within her own heart, for example, Eloisa states that the cold sterility of monastic life is balanced by the heat of passion, a juxtaposition that Pope repeats throughout the poem. Similar effects and balances are found in the virgin's "visions of eternal day," which for example, are contrasted with Eloisa's "horrors of all-conscious night." Pope achieves a sense of symmetry for the entire poem by dividing it into three roughly equal parts: the first third of the poem explores the love that existed in the past, the middle third Eloisa's present conflict, and the last third her hope for future reconciliation.
Pope used the verse epistle form to explore the conflicting desires and psychological torment of his heroine. Eloisa longs for the love and passion she and Abelard once shared.
Her desire for Abelard prevents her from finding solace within her present life of quiet celibacy. At times Eloisa regrets her love for Abelard, which she associates with both the flames of passion and damnation: "In seas of flame my plunging soul is drowned." Eloisa recognizes, however, that without the memory of their love, she would be less alive, even less human. She understands that her religious vows, a final rejection of earthly love, represent a death as well as a rebirth. The warmth and vitality of her youth died when she
"with cold lips … kiss'd the sacred veil."
Pope refuses to reduce Eloisa's story to a salvation narrative. Eloisa's love for
Abelard prevents her from finding spiritual bliss, yet spirituality, or at least the poem's medieval Christianity, is cold, barren, and lifeless. When Eloisa reports that her love causes her to shed "too soft a tear," the reader recognizes that without human love she would be not only less passionate but also, perhaps, less compassionate, more like cold
"pale-ey'd virgins" of the convent. Through love and suffering, Eloisa has grown spiritually, but her reward is unceasing torment.
Far from a simple poem about lost love, "Eloisa to Abelard" explores the sometimes agonizing complexity and irreconcilability of physical and spiritual longing. Equally important, it does so through the voice of a heroine who is intelligent, articulate, and sophisticated. While many eighteenth century writers, including Pope, satirized women and ridiculed feminine passion, Eloisa is presented sympathetically, even heroically.
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The central concern of "A Description of a City Shower" is the city's inhabitants who are caught by Swift in a series of comic vignettes as they scurry to avoid the impending "flood." The poem shows that Jonathan Swift is not only dissatisfied with the human condition, but he also possesses an eye keen enough to discern the follies that so often arise from confusing appearance and reality—which is precisely what eighteenth century pastoral poetry routinely did. The facts of eighteenth century rural life were cold and hard. Farmers and rural workers lived lives at the other end of the spectrum from the hazily romantic imaginings of pastoral poetry. Like their lower-class counterparts in the city, they worked long, back-breaking hours, usually for little more than a subsistence wage. No amount of flowery language or elaborate, classical imagery could improve their lot or effectively substitute fantasy for reality.
His other poem, "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed," depicts the rank grossness of human flesh when it is divested of all ornament and is operating in its natural state. Indeed, any temptation to sympathize with the downtrodden, much-victimized
Corinna inevitably runs up against Swift's conception of both God and humankind. For
Swift, God is a largely unapproachable, unspeakably transcendent being who created the world and left behind certain commandments, laws that establish minimal requirements of human behavior. In Swift's view, Corinna and her clients clearly fall short of those moral standards, to the point that the harlot poses an outright danger to the community.
Further, any sympathetic response to Corinna and her troubles must first be grounded in seeing her as a real human being. However, this particular prostitute's ills are so calamitous that she calls forth much more laughter than empathy. While any person might rightly respond sympathetically toward a "beautiful nymph" with, say, a glass eye, that milk becomes distinctly clabbered when the reader learns that the same woman is bald, crafts her eyebrows from mouse skins, has no teeth, props up her breasts with rags, and wears a steel-ribbed corset and artificial hips. In short, her farcical portrayal in the poem is so purposefully and grotesquely overdone as to effectively block any empathetic response.
However, while Corinna may not be "real," the hazards that she poses certainly are; paradoxically, the unreality of the harlot allows Corinna to be betrayed for what she really is—namely, a social menace. After all, her morning-after attempt to restore her mechanical, absurdly artificial body ultimately represents an effort at general contagion: In short, Swift here succeeds in accomplishing his thematic and moral purposes in this disturbing poem.
In "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat," Thomas Gray laughs at the human traits of vanity and greed. That he associates a pampered cat with privileged coquettes is neither sexist nor misogynistic, for to show the baseness of these traits Gray needed an animal— and the animal that occasioned the poem was Selima, a dead female cat. Gray also ridicules another human trait, sentimentality. A minor theme satirizes the folly of violating hierarchy or the order of things. Although only a cat, Selima is the "Fav'rite," more privileged than either of the servants, Tom and Susan. Her grooming and leisure, especially contrasted with the lives of the servants, show clearly that order, degree, and common sense are out of joint. A final theme is delicately sexual, based on the poem's close association between cat and coquette. With her romantic name, Selima is demure and
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sleek, her face fair, her coat elegant, her ears beautiful, and her emerald eyes captivating.
Personified, she is a nymph and a maid gazing at her reflection. Gray's satiric target here is not women, but vain and foolish ladies, leisured flirts with "wand'ring eyes."
Gray's other poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a meditation about death as the final estate of the human condition, regardless of wealth, position, or power.
The first four stanzas present images of twilight settling over a solitary figure in a small country churchyard. The first line, "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day," expresses the inevitable presence of death in three words: tolls' knell, and parting. Stanza 4 concludes the opening picture and leaves no doubt about the subject of the meditation: "Each in his narrow cell forever laid, / The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep." The next four stanzas continue the theme of death as the end of all individuals by listing the activities the dead used to do but do "no more." The repetition of "no more" and "For them no more" emphasizes the fact that all human activity leads to the grave.
The poet has established a dramatic point of view: The reader sees the world through the eyes of a single figure who is humankind, who sees the truth and sees the destiny of all. Yet each of the "rude forefathers" represents humankind as well: Their fate is our own. Thus one has both the living, contemplating human destiny and death, and the dead, whose destiny is all too clear. These two merge later in the poem, beginning in stanza 24, where, suddenly, the speaker imagines himself dead and buried, and the reader is invited to read his epitaph. In the face of inevitable doom, the speaker holds out the hope for immortality by making a friend of Heaven and by believing that, dead, he rests in "The bosom of his Father and his God."
Question Two:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's major poems turn on problems of self-esteem and identity.
Exploring states of isolation and ineffectuality, they test strategies to overcome weakness without asserting its antithesis—that is a powerful self, secure in its own thoughts and utterances. This is evident in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," which establishes a structural pattern for the conversation poems as a group. Explicate that structural pattern in
"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison"?
Answer:
Coleridge's major poems turn on problems of self-esteem and identity. Exploring states of isolation and ineffectuality, they test strategies to overcome weakness without asserting its antithesis—a powerful self, secure in its own thoughts and utterances, the potency and independence of which Coleridge feared would only exacerbate his loneliness.
His reluctance to assert his own abilities is evident in his habitual deprecation of his own poetry and hyperbolic praise of William Wordsworth's. It is evident as well in his best verse, which either is written in an unpretentious "conversational" tone or, when it is not, is carefully dissociated from his own voice and identity. Yet by means of these strategies, he is often able to assert indirectly or vicariously the strong self he otherwise repressed.
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"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" establishes a structural pattern for the conversation poems as a group. The structure of the poem can be summarized as follows:
A state of isolation (the more isolated for the presence of an unresponsive companion) gives way to meditation, which leads to the possibility of a self powerful through its association with an all-powerful force. This state of mind gives place to the acknowledgment of a human relationship dependent on the poet's recognition of his own inadequacy, the reward for which is a poetic voice with the authority to close the poem.
The verse paragraphs of the poem informally divide the speaker's thought processes into three sections of approximately equal length. The progression is dramatic and seems at first to follow the process of association, not the rules of logic. The speaker begins by expressing irritation, then feels sympathy for his friend Lamb, then is both happy that he is enjoying his own situation and hopeful that Lamb can feel what he feels.
At first, incapacitated by a burn—appropriately, his wife's fault—Coleridge is left alone seated in a clump of lime trees while his friends—Lamb and William and Dorothy
Wordsworth—set off on a long walk through the countryside. Coleridge is irritated at being left behind; his garden seems a prison. They are there and yet not there: Their presence in the poem intensifies Coleridge's sense of isolation. He follows them in his imagination, and the gesture itself becomes a means of connecting himself with them. He resents not being with his friends, who are seeing remarkable sights and responding with intense feelings to them. Not only would these sights and feelings have been good in themselves, but also they would have remained in the poet's memory to cheer him later on, when he is old and even blind. Coleridge childishly complains that he may never see his friends again. With envy he lists the sights he imagines they see: a shady dell, an ash tree, a waterfall, tall weeds, and cliffs. At this point, Coleridge's mood begins to change. He thinks of Lamb, who must spend most of his days in London and who must patiently bear an unnamed "strange calamity." (Lamb was burdened with the care of his sister Mary, who had recently murdered their mother in a fit of madness.)
Natural images of weakness, enclosure, and solitude give way to those of strength, expansion, and connection, and the tone of the poem shifts from speculation to assertion.
Coleridge now imagines the beauties of the oncoming evening and the colors that the setting sun brings out in the clouds, the sea, and the land. In a climactic moment, he imagines his friends "gazing round / On the wide landscape" until it achieves the transcendence of "such hues / As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes / Spirits perceive his presence."
The perception of an omnipotent force pervading the universe returns Coleridge to his present state, but with a new sense of his own being and his relationship with the friends to whom he addresses the poem. His own isolation is now seen as an end in itself.
"Sometimes / 'Tis well to be bereft of promised good," Coleridge argues, "That we may lift the soul, and contemplate / With lively joy the joys we cannot share." He concludes that it was a good thing that he could not accompany his friends, for now he is appreciative of the nature he finds in his own garden. He imagines that the bird he sees fly across the face of the risen moon is also seen or heard by his friend Lamb, wherever his walk has taken him.
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Question Three:
Draw a comparison between William Collins' poem "Ode to Evening" and John Keats's poem "When I Have Fears" to show the difference in poetic technique and vision between both poets?
Answer:
William Collins' poem "Ode to Evening" and John Keats's poem "When I Have
Fears" are both nature poems, which represent two different poetic eras that are characterized by the difference in poetic technique and vision.
"Ode to Evening" is a nature poem, one of those often considered a prelude to the
Romantic movement or a deliberate and intentional antidote to the heroic genres most prominent in the earlier part of the Augustan age. The poem looks forward to the Age of
Sensibility. Collins' ode promotes scenic nature in contrast to the neoclassical emphasis upon human nature. Similarly, it even hints at the sublime in the section describing the mountain storm and the view from the hut as well as in the images of winter at the end.
Nevertheless, just as evening is neither day nor night, this poem is neither fully pre-
Romantic nor conventionally neoclassical. It is transitional, subtle, and generally quiet, like its subject.
Even though Collins follows convention in imagery, diction, and verse form, he demonstrates that he is not a slave to it. The ode exerts the "gentlest" of influences, as its subject does. Even the superlatives Collins uses are not exaggerations, but the superlative forms of adjectives such as "gentle" and "meek." The striking passages are, first, those depicting the prospect of a violent mountain storm as well as attack by winter on Eve's entourage and her flowing garments; and second, the images which are more sharply focused in the pageant of seasons which ends the poem. These seem to establish the grounds for the earlier prayer in hopes of adopting evening's calm demeanor and reserved behavior. Especially poignant are the lines describing how the wind and rain of the storm keep the poet's "willing feet" from obeying their desire to follow Eve. The final section ventures into a more vivid style of natural depiction. The fragrances of spring, the length of summer days, the effect engendered by autumn colors and temperatures are just as compelling as the violence of winter and are not overpowered by it. The apparent timidity of the earliest passages and the passion tapped in the heath scene have a purpose within the poem itself: a careful buildup to a final celebration.
As "Ode to Evening" is written in imitation of the Roman poet Horace, the verse is unrhymed, with a metrical pattern developing as follows: alternating sets of two iambic pentameter lines and two shorter lines of iambic trimeter. The sequence of longer and shorter couplets is more important for purposes of unity here than it would have been had the lines been rhyming couplets. Collins' use of couplets follows the neoclassical tradition, but his introduction of the short trimeter lines and the last of rhyme are viewed, in that context, as an aberration. His balancing of long and short couplets helps to structure a poem considered too short for the verse paragraphs of blank verse and too long for one stanza. If each four-line set is viewed as a unit, the poem could be divided into thirteen
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stanzas. Ultimately, the metrical balance reflects the alternation of day and night, although only a transitional part of this cycle is the focus of the content and the imagery.
Collins uses conventional neoclassical poetic diction without resorting to extreme or ridiculous phraseology. One possible exception is the "pilgrim born in heedless hum," a metaphor for a bee. Primarily, however, Collins' metaphors stand on their own merits, sometimes coming close to clichés but not overcome by them. Language depicting pastoral images, such as "oaten stop," "yon western tent" of the sun, the "folding star" of Hesperus, and the mountain and valley landscapes, establish the general tone of the poem and reflect
Collins' neoclassicism. The Miltonic overlay created by these images, by the imitations of
Miltonic style, and by lines alluding to others by Milton cannot be ignored.
Nature imagery serves to depict how darkness begins to take over the atmosphere without fanfare and develops a personality for Eve. The combination of these details and the adjectives used to describe Eve, such as modest, chaste, and meek, creates a comfortable feeling. The comforts of tone and quiet devotion are driven off, however, by personal references to the poet, who, in spite of "willing feet," is hiding inside the "hut, /
That, from the mountain's side, / Views wilds, and swelling floods" because of the cold and rainy winds on a suggestively Shakespearean heath. The image of spring would be overpowered by this picture, despite the sound of the church bell, were it not for the compelling pictures created for the other seasons in the ending.
John Keats's "When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be" is a Shakespearean sonnet, which gives expression to his fear that his young life may be cut off before he has a chance to experience the love of a woman and to develop and complete his calling as a poet. These feelings leave him with a forsaken sense of the vanity of love and fame. The very first line, "When I have fears that I may cease to be," captures the reader's attention at once, for the fear of premature death is universal. Especially when the potential of a richly productive and rewarding life is anticipated so intensely, the threat to its realization is all the more dispiriting.
Keats's studied reading of Shakespeare, especially of the songs and sonnets, inspired him to pursue the perfection of his own poetic skills, including the mastery of the sonnet form as a supreme challenge to his artistry as poet and his mastery of its technical demands.
This was his first but impressively successful attempt at a Shakespearean sonnet, with its four divisions of three quatrains, each with a rhyme scheme of its own and a rhymed concluding couplet. The three quatrains of this sonnet are perfectly parallel, shaped as they are by their rhetorical and grammatical structure. Each refers to a different aspect of the poet's confrontation with his own mortality, introduced by the subordinating conjunction
"When": "When I have fears," "When I behold," "And when I feel." In characteristic
Shakespearean-sonnet fashion, these three quatrains lead up to the "then" of the last two lines: "then on the shore." Here the main clause of the poem counterbalances the three subordinating ones that precede it by expanding the personal pain to a universal lament.
The solemn tone and heavy funereal beat of the couplet underscore the poet's sense of desolation. That sense of desolation is wrought especially through the cumulative effect of the poet's choice of imagery and analogy. In the first quatrain, his choice of words such as
"glean'd," "garners," and "full-ripen'd grain" obviously refers to harvest. Thus, the growth
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of his poetic genius is like the growing seasons that lead up to harvest time. The seasons are needed for poetic powers to grow and for the "pen" to glean such growth into "books," as granaries store the harvested grain. Hence, the poet's fear that there may be no time for developing his gifts, no time to produce what he is capable of, is like the farmer's fear that what has been sown will never come to fruition—a terrible sense of dread that something of great value will be lost.
Reference to nature's fecundity in the first quatrain shifts to nature's "high romance" in the second. Nature becomes not a source of sustenance but of inspiration. The poet thinks of "sky," "stars," clouds and "shadows," the "Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance." To a romantic poet like Keats, these serve as vital wellsprings to his imagination and his art, essential to the fulfillment of what he has embraced as his poetic calling. An early death would make a mockery of that calling.
The poem is not only about the beauty and mystery of nature; it also discusses human beauty and love, the subject of the third quatrain. Now the poet does not "think," as he did in the preceding quatrain; he says, "I feel." The need for the love of a woman—for the "fair creature of an hour"—and the fear that this need will go forever unmet are emotions of the heart. Both his heart and mind are now in the grip of fears that life will cease and cut him off from all that is most important. The imagery in the closing couplet reflects his utter desolation: a lone figure "on the shore / Of the wide world," the waters of an endless ocean swallowing "Love and Fame," his passionate hopes for a remarkable life.
Question Four:
Discuss the idea of poetic creativity in Byron's poem "The Destruction of Sennacherib"?
Answer:
Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib" is an example of the Romantic philosophy in both its revolutionary subject matter and in how Byron, by using vivid details and descriptive language, purges the "film of familiarity" from a commonly told story.
"The Destruction of Sennacherib" is written in four-line stanzas called quatrains, with the first and second, as well and the third and fourth, lines rhyming. Similarly, there are four stresses, or beats, in each line (this is called tetrameter). In reading this poem— with its four stresses per line and four lines per stanza—aloud, our ear begins to recognize a marching beat, like a snare drum keeping time: "the asSYRian came DOWN like the
WOLF on the FOLD, and his COhorts were GLEAMing in PURple and GOLD." A march, literally, is a song written in straight four beats per measure. Often poets use this unique relationship between the rhythm or sound of the poem and its subject matter to help bring a scene or experience to life. In this case, even the most structured and traditional form helps
Byron find freedom of expression.
Another point of poetic structure Byron uses to help match the poem's form to its subject is the use of consonance and assonance or matching consonant sounds and vowel sounds in a line. This can have a variety of effects, depending on which sounds are repeated. In line where he is describing smashing false idols in the temple of Baal, Byron
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repeats the sharp consonant sounds—"d," "b," "k," and "t"—to match the sound of the line to the action, "the idols are broke in the temple of Baal." Whereas in the last line, he uses softer sounds like "th," "m" "l" and "n" to recreate the subtle image of snow melting "in the glance of the lord."
The poem itself is more narrative than lyric, meaning it tells a story in a chronological order, describing a scene and characters working their way through a situation. Because our understanding of any poem first depends on our ability to figure out what is happening at the literal or narrative level, it is useful to walk through a close reading of the poem. Byron opens the narrative with a panoramic description of the
Assyrian King along with his army that is dressed in purple and gold, with spears shining
"like stars on the sea." Sennacherib is the powerful Pagan King of Assyria, a non Judeo-
Christian civilization, and purple and gold are colors usually associated with royalty or nobility. In the first line, Byron compares Sennacherib to a wolf sneaking into a "fold," or sheep pen, which, by analogy, also paints the King as a dangerous and deceitful man. His
"host," or army, could be seen at sunset with banners waving like "leaves of the forest when summer is green." Here, within the first five lines, Byron introduces yet another color, green, that usually reminds us of vitality, freshness, and life.
But no sooner does he establish this scene does Byron begin to paint a darker picture: suddenly the seasons change from summer to autumn, as the bodies of the Assyrian army "withern and strown" across the field like leaves. We learn in the beginning of stanza three this is because the "Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, / And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed." The angel of death is a character out of the Judeo-
Christian bible, and here he enters the scene to wipe out an entire army with a spread of his wings and one breath. What remains is an apocalyptic landscape completely devoid of any of its previous inhabitants. It is a scene perhaps symbolic of the revolutionary change the
Romantic poets such as Byron strove for.
By the time the reader gets only two stanzas into the retelling of the Sennacherib's destruction, the war is already over. In the remaining four stanzas of the poem, Byron uses vividly descriptive language and images to zoom in on the scene, recreating the aftermath in such a precise way that readers are forced to look at a familiar story in a fresh way and with a new sense of wonder. He points out the multiple "eyes of sleepers waxed deadly and still," and the sound of their hearts heaving a last few beats before death. He focuses on the horse's breathless nostril and the foam from its mouth that lay on the grass "cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf." By using this comparison, or simile, to re-create a scene,
Byron is drawing the reader in by asking us to participate with him in the act of imagining by seeing (and feeling) the cold foam from the horse's gasping mouth in a way we probably never have before—like sea-spray pounding the shore. Byron is a master in his craft, and his comparison is accurate in both its literal description and its source of violent action; the horse is struggling on the ground like a "rock beating surf."
After describing the multitudes of dead and their fallen horses, Byron focuses the fifth stanza on who we can guess to be King Sennacherib himself, dead on the ground in rusting armor, amid an empty group of tents and banners. The actual battle, so quickly over with early on in the poem, is diminished even further when Byron tells us the Assyrians'
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swords remained "unlifted, the trumpet unblown." In the next and last stanza he similarly describes the army as "unsmote by the sword," implying they were not killed by man-made weapons. The actual destruction and revolution, Byron seems to say, is caused by a much more powerful source that can kill whole armies in one sweeping gesture, much like that described in stories from the Bible's "Book of Revelations." Here again is the reoccurring vision of apocalypse.
The final stanza pans the camera back again, until we can hear the "widows of
Ashur" crying loudly and see the false pagan idols broken in the temple of Baal. Ashur, it is important to note, is both the name of the god of war, as well as the original capital city of Assyria. In the closing lines, the entire might of the Gentiles, or non-Christians, dissolves like snow under a hot sun; a whole civilization is brought down under "the glance of the lord." Bringing things full circle, Byron ends this poem, which began using images of summer, then autumn, with winter ending and the melting of snow. And although he never mentions the next and final season specifically, we instinctively know that this poem ends as spring begins and new growth emerges from a frozen and dead landscape.
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