For an Assyrian Frieze

What is the main conflict in For an Assyrian Frieze by Peter Viereck?

Asked by
Last updated by Jill W
1 Answers
Log in to answer

Viereck's poem examines the conflicting emotions in the poet. Confronted by the implacable foreignness of this bas-relief, in which a "lion with a prophet's beard" represents all of the cruelty and bloodthirstiness of ancient societies, the narrator falls into a reverie, imagining the lion to be speaking to him. The lion is the stone embodiment of all of the warlike rulers of the Assyrian empire, from the early "Shamshi," who reigned in the eighteenth century before Christ, to Sargon, who held the throne one thousand years later. The narrator imagines this lion, who is a metonym for the whole Assyrian culture, to be speaking to him, telling him about the way he preened himself while his armies were slaughtering thousands. The narrator cannot understand this love for violence, but when the lion speaks of it he remembers that other people of that foreign time and land also gloried in violence and slaughter, even the Israelites who are the predecessors to the pacifistic early Christians. By describing the lion as having a "prophet's beard," Viereck makes this difficult-to-understand combination even more explicit. We must confront the fact, Viereck argues, that even those who followed the Hebrew God engaged in this sort of violence. It was not just the Assyrians, those villains of the Old Testament, but it was the Hebrews themselves who slaughtered on a massive scale. And, he concludes the poem by saying that "luminous" "gangrene" still lives on this earth, certainly a reference to the war just ended when this poem was written, a war that killed hundreds of times more people than were killed in any Assyrian war.

Source(s)

For an Assyrian Frieze