The fourteenth-century Siege of Jerusalem has been called by Ralph
Hanna the chocolate-covered tarantula of the alliterative movement for
its apparent anti-Semitism and is, as Livingston notes in his
introduction, simply difficult for twenty-first-century readers to like.
The poem, which describes the destruction of the Second Temple by Roman
forces in AD 70, is graphic in detail and unpleasant in its relish of
the suffering of the Jews. But as Livingston points out, Like the gritty
violence of Alliterative Morte Arthure, the gore in Siege is perhaps
best read as a grim awareness of the terrible realities of war, not as a
bloodthirsty and berserk cry for further bloodshed. The poem chronicles
a historical war, and it is this historical quality that must stand out:
the poem not only has resonances of the bloodshed that battle inevitably
brings, but it also is, in a very literal sense, history. This is to
say, the war is over. The vengeance of Jesus has been accomplished. The
Siege-poet's answer to the social-political-religious question of
whether there is such a thing as a just war is that there was one: Titus
and Vespasian's vengeance for the death of Christ. . . . Further efforts
to avenge Christ were unnecessary. . . . That the poem is a call to
action and to crusade, then, seems to be a claim that is far less
sustainable than its opposite: a call to peace and to remembrance.
