[MS: Isaiah 14:4 - Calling out tyrants in mashal, songs of mockery, and in the language of poetry in prophetic satire from Isaiah to contemporary tyrants, Stalin, Hitler and others. See below: Russian poet Osip Mandelstam wrote his famous “Stalin Epigram,” like an Isaiah.]
Chapter 6 Prophecy and Poetry (pp. 171-204)
Poetry, as I have been arguing throughout this study, is not just a set of techniques for saying impressively what could be said otherwise.
Rather, it is a particular way of imagining the world... (p.189) (emphasis added)
....
What are the principal modes of prophetic poetry? The overarching purpose is reproof .... and this general aim is realized through three related poetic strategies: (1) direct accusation; (2) satire; (3) the monitory evocation [ MS: warning of ] impending disaster. ... Such poetry is a kind of terrific verbal buttonholing of the listeners, directly calling them the names they have earned through their actions, reminding them of all that they have perpetrated....
Isaiah 14:4-21
p. 183 - 186 (excerpts)(emphasis added)
But it can even happen occasionally in satire, as the provoking pretensions of the satiric target invite a mythological scale of mimicry in the satiric poem. The strongest example of such prophetic satire is the sarcastic-triumphal “elegy” over the “king of Babylon” in Isaiah 14:4–21. Its prose introduction (the first half of 14:4) announces the poem as a mashal, a literary term of shifting meanings that in the Prophets usually refers to songs of mockery. …
The force of this justly famous poem is clear enough without the necessity for much close reading, but it is worth looking at briefly to see how the language of poetry in prophetic satire ... works in splendid excess of the historical occasion.
1. How is the taskmaster ended, arrogance is ended!
2. The LORD has broken the wicked’s scepter, the rod of rulers.
3. He who struck down peoples in fury, in unrelenting blows,
4. who held sway in wrath over nations, chased down unsparingly.
5. All the earth is calm and quiet, bursts forth in song....
6. The very evergreens rejoice over you, the cedars of Lebanon:
7. “With you now laid low, the woodsman won’t come against us.”
....
14 Your bed is spread with worms, your blankets are maggots.
15 How are you fallen from the heavens, Bright One, Son of Dawn!
16 You are cut down to earth, dominator of nations!”
17 And you once thought in your heart: “To the heavens will I ascend, above God’s stars I’ll raise my throne....
[MS: Alter quotes verses 1- 31. Emphasis added; compare to poem Stalin Epigram cited below]
....
(pp. 187-88) At this point, it becomes irrelevant whether the king who is the object of the poet’s satire is Sargon or Sennacherib or somebody else. What is clear is that the language of the poem makes him the very archetype of self-deifying (and hence self-deluding) earthly power. ...
His reign is an unending orgy of violence and murder; even his own people join the roll of his victims. Relentlessly wielding his scepter/bludgeon, he imagines that no limits whatever can be put on his power, that he overmasters the earth as a veritable god. At his ignominious death, the world again rejoices, can envision a future in which, instead of being the wasteland he made it, it will once more be filled with inhabited towns.
From the global perspective through which the poem views the tyrant, his career becomes an exemplary instance of how man overreaches himself in his unslaked thirst for power and by so doing turns civilization into desolation. As a powerful exemplum, the poem possesses a quality of timelessness: though particularly inspired, we may assume, by the historically specific barbarity of Babylonian domination in the early sixth century B.C.E. ... it gives body and weight to a grim image of political perversion that we have known all too well in the century of Hitler and Stalin.
Indeed, when the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam wrote his famous “Stalin Epigram,” in 1933, evoking the mass murderer with “ten thick worms his fingers,” who “toys with the tributes of half-men,” “rolls the executions on his tongue like berries,” he was working in the same genre of deadly serious poetic satire as Isaiah, with the same timeless definition of moral possibility in his rendering of the immediate object of satire—though, alas, without the prophet’s ability to envision a happy resolution. ...(p.189)
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[MS: This note is written on the morning of Election Day 2022 in America and during the Battle of Kherson in Ukraine.]