[In the following essay, Hamori explores aspects of al-Mutanabbi's poetry that would have appealed to his contemporary audience.]

Among the classical Arabic poems that treat specific events, many are strongly linear.¹ The composition of the work at hand² is best understood as an occasionally intricate variation on an implicit linear sequence. Al-Mutanabbī's mastery of sound and phrase are evident in it throughout, but the design is largely responsible for the power.

The poem—a panegyric—opens with a two-line moral generalization (“what seems great to the mean seems mean to the great,” etc.) that is applied, in vss. 3-4, to the recipient: Sayf al-Dawla.³ In Arabic poetry, generalization followed by specific application often serves as preface, the reverse as conclusion. The latter was observed by the medieval writers on rhetoric.⁴ Why such a technique of composition would develop is easy to see. Apt generalization—ḥikma—is valued by the culture in the first place. When the ḥikma stands in a formal relation to the rest of the matter (when coolly indisputable axiom leads into the tenser stuff on the specific; when the specific comes to a rest, resolution, in the general) the ḥikma acquires a functional esthetic value.⁵

A third couplet completes the introduction. It is a conventional topos, and its work here is obvious: after a measure of the hero's enterprises, there follows an image pointing out their accomplishment. Sayf al-Dawla lays awesome tasks upon his army—the birds of prey need fear no hunger. The rhymes do a remarkable job of holding together the second and third couplets: haḍārimu, by assonances in excess of the rhyme, prepares ḍarāgimu, and then ḍarāgimu is tied to the first rhyme-word in the next couplet (qašā‘imu) by both meaning and derivation. (They are quadriliteral animal nouns). Rhyme words of this type recur in the poem, as we shall see, in places determined by its plan of composition.

Ibn Rašīq writes that when a poet sets about working on a new piece, he should decide on meter and rhyme and then compile a list of appropriate rhyme words.⁶ When he starts composing, the lines will very likely not occur to him in order: now he will think of one that must go into a block of verses already written, now he must set one aside to use farther along. Some light is thrown on this account of the poet's work, and also on the piece we are reading, by a comparison with a poem of iftihār in the same meter and rhyme, by al-Šarīf al-Raḍī.⁷ It is a piece of some sixty lines. Roughly thirty percent of the rhymes used in it are also used by al-Mutanabbī. The overlapping group includes—as one would expect—a number of the quadriliterals (ḍarāgim, ḍubārim, qašā‘im, etc.) that because of their sense and phonetic fahāma suit the heroic manner, as well as others that go naturally with the subject (ṣawārim, gamāgim, mutalāṭim, etc.). A larger sampling of poems with all but the simplest rhymes would, I think, bear out the view that for any topic there is a core vocabulary of rhyme words of high incidence. The poet's success depends to no little extent on the effective placement of his rhyme words.

Only such a state of affairs can account for the other report in the ‘Umda: that some people set down in advance, and in exact sequence, the rhymes they have determined to use.⁸ Ibn Rašīq sees that this method must cramp the writer. There is no reason to doubt, though, that some people used it. And why would they start with the full scaffolding of rhymes unless they, as well as the better poets, wanted the sequence of rhymes to do some kind of work?

There are, incidentally, other places in the poem where verses very closely linked in matter have rhyme words with extreme assonance. Vss. 11-12 (on dahr and the layālī) rhyme in rāgimu and gawārimu—not only a rhyme but also a kind of tagnīs at a distance. The couplet that is the spatial and temporal focus of the poem, vss. 25-6 (discussed below), forms a grammatical unit (ḍamamta … bi-ḍarbin), and also rhymes paronomastically in qawādimu and qādimu.

In verse 7 the second section of the poem begins, syntactically marked off by a change from declarative to interrogative. An added marked term is the proper noun al-Hadat. It so happens that the combination of the interrogative sentence and proper noun recurs in line 14 (introducing the approach of the Rūm and Rūs and the ensuing battle) and in line 33 (introducing the mocking of the Domesticus).⁹ There is nothing haphazard about this. We shall see that both the articulation into parts and the weaving together of the parts are done with sure craftsmanship.

The second section (vss. 7-13) and the third differ greatly in length and in manner of discourse. For a rough description of their relation we may borrow Ibn Rašīq's very loose definition of the rhetorical figure he calls tafsīr: something put in summary form, mugmalan, is followed by full exposition.¹⁰Tafsīr is really a much more precise logical relation (as we shall see below) but it is true that Ibn Rašīq describes the listener's impression of the movement of thought; and the movement of disclosure in the poem, from succinct to detailed, is analogous. In the second section we find out that a battle was fought at al-Hadat, that the bodies of the slain lay about it, that “you” returned it to Islam. But all this is put across in a nutshell, mugmalan. The entire matter is unfolded in detail, mufaṣṣalan, in the next section (beginning with the next line with name and interrogative). This narrative third section (vss. 14-32) reflects the second, whose enlargement it is, also in grammatical scaffolding: it too switches, in vs. 22, from third person verbs to the second person singular.

The al-Hadat section also deals summarily with temporal sequence. Verse 8 sets qabla nuzūlihi against lammā danā minhā. Distant past and most recent past are squeezed into single verses both in 10 and 11 (kāna … fa-aṣbaḥat; sāqahā … fa-radadtahā). These are as mere points of a temporal compass. The next section is, in this respect too, a broad elaboration of capsule statements already made. It has a straightforward temporal narrative.¹¹

The coextension of the matter of these sections is reflected, as we shall see, by resumptions of image.

The ending of the al-Hadat section too is noteworthy. In contrast to the beginning of the poem with its movement from the general to the specific, here the specific (“fate had hunted it,” this particular place, and “you returned it to Islam”) moves toward the general: “whatever you lay hands on escapes mutability” (vs. 12) and “whenever you form an intention …” (vs. 13). No ḥikma proper closes the section, but the response of the audience is created by the direction of thought towards the non-singular. The twin motifs of the stand against dahr and of baffling the normal flow of time are common to madīḥ, and recurrent in this poem.

The huge Byzantine army approaches. Their swords and armor glitter; their clamor rises to the stars. Such sights and sounds are a staple of description, cf. al-Buḥturī:¹²

fa-l-haylu taṣhalu wa-l-fawārisu tadda‘ī wa-l-bīḍu talma‘u wa-l-asinnatu tazharu

The horses neigh, the knights vaunt their noble blood, the swords flash and the spearpoints shine.

But al-Mutanabbī's sequence of description is particularly appropriate to the approaching army: light before sound.

Now the movement of narrative (from glimpse to full view) weaves in a narrative of movement. Approach becomes clash. Warriors face each other or flee. Then, with the apostrophe to the hero, a sudden halt: waqafta. The tide of the enemy threatens to roll on—as the next line says, brave men flee before it—but you have stopped. This waqafta faces down, across the space of six lines, the atawka in vs. 16. It is the still point after which, the battle won, the movement of men turns around.

In the description of the battle staple images and tropes, falling into pattern, are used to cumulative effect. In the four lines before battle is joined, the Byzantine army is described in images of illusion and confusion: horses without feet, swords indistinguishable from helmets, chaos of languages. But the battle sorts things out:

(20) fa-li-llāhi waqtun dawwaba l-gišša nāruhu fa-lam yabqa illā ṣārimun aw ḍubārimu

(21) taqaṭṭa‘a mā lā yaqṭa‘u l-dir‘a wa-l-qanāwa-farra mina l-fursāni man lā yuṣādimu

God, what a time that was! Its fire melted off the base metal / and there remained only the cutting sword and the lion-like warrior.

What could not shear through armor and spear was cut into pieces; / the horsemen who could not shock the enemy fled before it.

In this rhetorical tafsīr the compact terms ṣārimun and ḍubārimu are explained disjunctively. “Weapon” and “soldier” are, as it were, useless, muddled categories; the battle makes keener distinctions. The thrust of imagery is most striking in the first half of vs. 21, because of the contrast with vs. 9, which it echoes:

banāhā fa-a‘lā wa-l-qanā yaqra‘u l-qanā …

The earlier verse spoke of a confused clash of weapons. The later one—with the same violent onomatopoeia—presents an either/or.¹³

The hero's stand is the moment of truth, and certainly the hub of the poem. Vs. 25 (“you pressed the wings of the Byzantine army back against its heart …”) perhaps represents Sayf al-Dawla's strategy, perhaps not. Unquestionably it represents al-Mutanabbī's. For here in the poem, spatial and temporal extension collapse into the place and moment of the hero's stand. Vs. 25 suggests spatial compression; in the next line temporal process is squeezed into the downstroke of a sword. As I noted above, these two lines, complementary in content, are very tightly linked also by grammar and punning rhyme.

The battle proper is now decided. The next couplet winds it up, moving (as we might expect) towards generalization: “you preferred close combat … and whoever seeks glorious conquest. …”

Before we are done with the Rūm and Rūs we read about their pursuit and destruction. The composition is remarkable. Verse 29 is a variation on the simile in verse 10: the dead are amulets to ward off madness; the dead are dirhams scattered over a bride. Thus recapitulation aligns the mufaṣṣal with the mugmal. A second recapitulation follows immediately: the next lines describe Sayf al-Dawla's pursuit of the enemy and use an extremely close variant of the topos in vss. 5-6, the conclusion of the introductory section. Not only is the topos repeated (birds feeding on the dead) but the type of rhyme word too: with ṣalādimu (by metonymy, cf. al-Wāḥidī ad loc.) and arāqimu the quadriliteral animal words are back. Image and rhyme both mark the coextension of compact and detailed sections.

The next part of the poem (a-fī kulli yawmin dā l-dumustuqu muqdimun) taunts the defeated Domesticus. Accordingly it inverts some of the previous ma‘ānī of praise. Sayf al-Dawla outstripped lions (vs. 4); the Domesticus is less than a beast because he cannot recognize the scent of a lion (vs. 34). A more interesting contrast: the Byzantine army was a chaos of languages (mā yufhimu l-ḥuddāta illā l-tarāgimu); now the Domesticus understands the sound of swords although swords speak no articulate language:

wa-yafhamu ṣawta l-mašrafiyyati fīhimū ‘alā anna aṣwāta l-suyūfi a‘āgimu.

The poem concludes with a return to pure panegyric and some fahr of the poet's own. The negative wa-lasth malīkan should perhaps also be regarded as a syntactically marked switch-sentence, although it is not as clearly set off as the questions. The last three lines of the work all have non-narrative grammar: a vocative phrase, an elliptical formula (hanīr’ an li …) and a virtual optative in the form of a question (wa-lim lā). The grammar is a form of disengagement from the specific: a resolution. The rhyme words are as a rhetorician would want them at the end of a madīḥ: sālim, dā‘im. They are words of good augury, but nobly balanced by the hint in lim lā that all this splendor will end in the dust.

.....

There are two related questions one would wish answered, partly because of their own historical interest, partly because of confusions, occasioned by the end-stopped line, that have haunted the reading of Arabic poetry. Are these techniques for the articulation and association of parts at home in the poetic practice of the early Islamic centuries, or is our reading a plausible trouvaille? Would the poet's public have read (or heard) his poem anything as we did?

The authors of rhetoric books are of limited help. They thought of sequence and subdivisions in poetry in terms of the qaṣīda-style panegyric.¹⁴ They discussed the device of tahalluṣ¹⁵—especially tahalluṣ between introduction and madīḥ proper—because, as Iḥsān ‘Abbās has pointed out,¹⁶ their attention was drawn to particulars in which the qudamā’ and the moderns differed, and tahalluṣ was a case in point. They wrote about the openings and endings of complete poems.¹⁷ But they made almost no observations on the formal properties of the beginnings and ends of distinct parts of poems.¹⁸ Indeed they do not deal with the internal articulation of poems, except the string of motifs in the qaṣīda. This is of a piece with their refusal of attention to overall composition. The disinterest is explained by the goals. Their sights were set on principles of general application. They dealt with matters reducible to rule. Every poem has a beginning and an end; not every poem falls into distinct blocks. Those that do, follow a variety of patterns. On the other hand, the requirement of the harmony of parts—for this, as Iḥsān ‘Abbās has demonstrated, was their idea of the unity of a work¹⁹—was of general application. In burdensome consequence, we must often rely on internal evidence from the body of poetry if we wish to study recurrent features of composition and so recover some of the pleasure of the better attuned contemporary audience.

No representative sample of poetry can be presented here, but I do want to give at least a few examples that suggest that the chief compositional features of the Mutanabbī poem are not isolated.

A) EXAMPLES OF FORMALLY MARKED ARTICULATION.

The poem lawlā l-‘agūzu bi-manbigin … maniyya, by Abū Firās²⁰ falls into three distinct parts beginning with verses 1, 5 and 10. Very roughly, vss. 1-4 state that to the poet solicitude for his mother matters more than pride; 5-9 speak of the mother's excellence and the virtue of patient suffering; 10-15 are a variation on the last two themes but cast in the form of direct address. Each onset-line contains a proper name (Manbig). The first two segments are cast in the form “if … then … but.” (The second segment starts with a clause that turns out to be the antecedent of a long attributive clause: a woman such that law … lā … lākin.)

An example of a long ambitious poem laid out in clear subdivisions is al-Šarīf al-Raḍī's Karbalā lā zilti karban wa-balā … al-muṣṭafā.²¹ Here the first vocative introduces a summary description of the disastrous battle (key words: blood, tears, thirst); then a wāw-rubba phrase (the most common traditional section-marker) begins a block of verses about those who were killed. Vs. 11 leads into a section about the captives. Their description is bracketed between two halves of a conditional sentence and a vocative marks the shift: “O Prophet of God, had you seen … then (vs. 15) your eyes would have. …” The next section, about the captive women, is also bracketed off: it begins (vs. 16) with another vocative (“O people of reckless iniquity, ummata l-ṭugyān … this is no recompense [gazā] to the Prophet of God …”) and ends (vs. 22) with the statement “unbelief has achieved its revenge, and error (gayy) has triumphed. …” The assonance of words for wickedness and error in the bracketing lines (ṭugyān, bagy … gayy) is felicitous. Vs. 23 introduces, again with a vocative, (yā qatīlan qawwaḍa l-dahru bihī ‘amada l-dīni) a section in which the focus narrows to the death of a particular person: al-Husayn. Here I think a recitation of the poem would show that the vocative in vs. 30 must, with the two verses following, be the end of this section; but, in vs. 33, the next section too begins with exclamatory syntax: kam riqābin min banī Fāṭimatin. … This part deals with the severed head of al-Husayn. This is also bracketed between exclamations, for the verse from the conclusion of the previous section (vs. 30)

yā rasūla l-lāhi yā fāṭimatun yā amīra l-mu’minīna l-murtaḍā

is picked up in vs. 37:

mayyitun tabkī lahu fāṭimatun wa-abūhā wa-‘aliyyun dū l-‘ulā.

The severed head completes the memories of Karbala, and the poem moves on to two subsequent chapters in the history of good and evil: the ‘Alid imams and the Day of Judgment. The evils endured by the imams lead directly (ba‘ḍuhu āhid bi-riqāb ba‘ḍ as Ibn al-Atīr puts it in his chapter on tahalluṣ)²² into the Prophet's speech as accuser on the last day. The part devoted to the roll call of imams begins with an elliptical sentence (vs. 39)

ma‘šarun minhum rasūlu l-lāhi …

which is deictic in the same way the vocatives are within the poem, because ma‘šarun is not an alternate for a previously mentioned thing (as in fact mayyitun, two lines up, is) but an anticipation of the formal vocative that arrives six lines farther down with yā gibāla l-magdi. There is no predication at all until the verb in the line after this vocative. The speech of the Prophet in the concluding seven verses of the poem also begins with a vocative, which sets it off even as the tahalluṣ links it to the preceding segment.

A third example is a fine, unornamented elegy on the death of a son, by Abū Muḥammad al-Qāsim b. Yūsuf,²³ in which transitions between temporal layers are syntactically set off. The two-line introduction is followed by four verses that may be termed durative in aspect, for they recall long processes that came to a stop with the young man's death. (“When he had grown to maturity I was stricken …”). This section is followed, in vs. 7, by an exact past: a deathbed scene. The shift in aspect is marked by one in syntax: after a string of lines beginning with verbs there succeeds a nominal sentence (again of an idiomatically elliptical kind): āhiru ‘ahdī bihī ṣarī‘an. … This scene ends (in vs. 11) with death and burial. The next section reverts to the poet and his anguish after the death. Its aspect is again durative. It is introduced (vs. 14) by another departure from plain narrative syntax, this time a vocative (bunayya yā wāḥida l-banīna …).

Note that this poem shares another feature with al-Mutanabbī's panegyric: compact statement is followed by detailed, and resumed images mark coextension. The first two lines are summary:

kāna l-ladī hiftu an yakūnā
                    innā ilā l-lāhi rāgi‘ūnā
amsa l-muraggā abū taliyyin
                    muwassadan fī l-‘arā yamīnā.
What I had feared has happened. To God we return.
My hope, Abū ‘Alī, lies on his right side, laid in his bed of earth.

In what follows, the poem first takes up those themes that are durative in aspect (and hence related to hiftu, muraggā) and then the death scene which leads back at last to the image of the grave. Verse 2 is echoed in vss. 11-13:

tumma qaḍā naḥbahū wa-amsā fī cgadatin li-l-tarā dafīnā
ba‘īda dārin qarība gārin qad fāraqa l-ilfa wa-l-qarīnā
bāšara barda l-tarā bi-waghin qad kāna min qablihī maṣūnā.(24)
Then he died and became, / in a tomb, a buried thing that belongs to the earth,
A close neighbor with a faraway house, / one who has parted from friend and companion.
He touched the chill earth with a face / once well-protected.

I quote in such detail because this is a point where the modern reader is most likely to stumble. After the moving verses of a father's grief, after the gripping verses about the leaden tongue and straining eyelids of the dying, such formulas? Such stumbling over tarā!²⁵ But we must realize that these lines have a proper place in the composition.

The repetition of amsā … tarā, and the variation of muwassadan fi l-tarā as bāšara barda l-tarā bi-waghin (note how this stresses the most concrete sense of muwassad, “pillowed”) mark the boundary where the mufaṣṣal ends the elaboration of the mugmal. Moreover, the commonplace ba‘īd^a dārin qarīb^a cgārin too performs work where it stands. Interwoven with the echo-phrases, it brings a sense of resolution as it moves the mind towards a consensual perception. Such an expression—tending towards aphorism and tending towards formula—is a ḥikma of language. It works as a chord on which a thematic section can come to rest. It would be rewarding to study such phrases, because an audience that esteems and enjoys formula must clearly derive much of its pleasure from the rhythm of usage in a poem: from the alternation of the linguistically individual or neutral with the intimately traditional. The section of the poem that ends in vs. 6 concludes with a ḥikma (wa-l-mar‘u lā yadfa’u l-manūnā) as does the entire piece:

fa-l-mar’u rahnun bi-ḥālatayhī fa-šiddatan marratan wa-līnā
Man is in bondage to his two states, alternations of adversity and ease.

B) HIKMA, MATAL AS RESOLUTIONS OF SECTIONS.

A characteristic example occurs in an early poem (Hamāsa no. 34, by ‘Amr b. Ma‘dī-karib). The poem falls into three evident parts, the first dealing with preparations for a likely war, the second with the clash, the third with the death of friends and ṣabr. Before the temporal clause lammā ra’aytu signals the shift to the punctual, the first section—after various specific statements, including proper names—concludes with a ḥikma:

kullu mri’in yagrī ilā yawmi l-hiyāgi bímā sta‘adda.
Every man brings to the day of battle what he has made ready.

A much later example: the famous Firāqiyya of Ibn Zurayq has a long introductory section before the friend is mentioned in vs. 15 (astawdi‘u l-lāha fī bagdāda lī qamaran …). The introductory segment, in which the persona speaks of his never ending travels, concludes with a ḥikma (that summarizes the general meditation of three previous lines).²⁶

C) MUGMAL AND MUFAṣṣAL.

Often certain words or phrases of a poem are related in a way that rhetoric could name if the relation were contained in a single verse. A poem whose first rhyme-word is tuqbaru and last tunšaru employs a ṭibāq working over a distance.²⁷

A lyric that begins with an asseveration of the lover's certain and imminent death and ends with his sly willingness to accept a favor put off from this year until next makes witty use of the device of self-contradiction.²⁸ The use of a compact statement followed by its elaboration is analogous to the movement (though not the strict logical form) of tafsīr. But such techniques stayed beyond the rhetoricians' scope.

Commentators, however, were in a different case, for they set themselves different tasks. Their work was not prescriptive, but only explanatory. As a result a book like al-Marzūqī's great commentary on the Hamāsa²⁹ is illustrative of a careful reader's perceptions in ways missing from the rhetoric books.

The fundamental difference is this: al-Marzūqī pays attention to sequence. For example, commenting on no. 130, vs. 8 (in which, after nasīb and smoothly linked brief fahr, a specific event and proper names are mentioned) he writes: “What he had said so far was a way of arriving at the declaration that he is mindful of the concerns of his kin.”³⁰ In another instance, where the flow of speech seems to break as description abruptly yields to direct address, al-Marzūqī points out that this is no floundering but a matter of convention: “He leaves off telling about her, and turns to address her directly, following their [the poets'] custom of moving from one thing to another and varying their manner as they go through the themes of a poem.”³¹

In poem no. 3, al-Marzūqī notes where the transition from general to specific takes place. In verse 5 a place-name appears after a section of general tribal fahr, and al-Marzūqī paraphrases the poet: “The fighting men I referred to above in the phrase horsemen who proved true my opinion of them are the ones who defended the ḥimā of this locality with blows that brought together the scattered fates of death.” Then he adds his comment: “This is a restricted statement after an unrestricted one, and a specific after a general.”³²

In Hamāsa no. 2, there are two layers of time: (vss. 1-4) “We had tried forbearance, but when there was only enmity left, we served them as they had served us (dinnāhum kamā dānū). (Vs. 5) We marched out as an angry lion goes forth in the morning. …” Al-Marzūqī comments on vs. 4: “What he says in the next verse is a detailed statement of what is in a nutshell in dinnāhum, because he sets forth (fassara) how this retaliation was.”³³

But is this fassara in al-Marzūqī's commentary technical (i.e. does it refer to a rhetorical figure) or does it have the sense from everyday usage? He does use tafsīr elsewhere in the loose sense, as in no. 134 where vs. 2 is “tafsīrun li-l-gaḍabi l-ladī dakarahu (in vs. 1) wa-bayānu natīgatih.” In the present case too, the passage would not be a good example of what the rhetoricians normally call tafsīr. Ibn Rašīq, as we have seen, begins his chapter on this figure with an unrigorous definition: “tafsīr means that the poet furnishes a full exposition of something that he has first put summarily.”³⁴ But in fact, Ibn Rašīq's examples (as also those of Abū Hilāl) show the rhetorician's fascination with logically neat relations. There are two kinds of relations in these examples. In one kind the members of a set (e.g. “instruments of war,”) are enumerated after some general reference to the set.³⁵ In the other, a list of objects belonging to a set is followed by a second set of objects, each member of the second set correlated, one to one, to a term of the first set. (This is of course what we had in al-Mutanabbī: ṣārim = other than what does not cut through armor; ḍubārim = other than those who cannot shock the enemy). By the time we come to the post-Gurgānī period, the rhetoricians have got their logic in order and al-Qazwīnī's definition is absolutely rigorous: “al-laff wa-l-našr (this is his name for it) occurs when reference is made, either in detailed or in summary form, to a set of several members, and afterwards to the things that pertain to each, without specifying in each case [which correlated thing goes with which member of the original set], because the speaker trusts that the audience will be able to refer each back to each.”³⁶

Now, it is quite impossible to consider the sequence mašaynā … bi-ḍarbin … wa-ṭa‘nin in Hamāsa no. 2 as a set, both because of the grammar and because mašā is not in the same category of action as ḍaraba and ṭa‘ana.

What cumbersome analysis shows, then, is what one knows intuitively at first glance: it would be pointless to say that dinnāhum and the next three verses are a rhetorical figure, although in a loose sense it is certainly true that having said “we served them as they had served us,” we can go on and “explain” how we went out and knocked them about.

The conclusion to draw is this: al-Marzūqī looked for, and observed, connections between parts of poems, and described these in terms that were also used in rhetoric proper, but he used these terms in a loose, commonsense way.

There is a bonus. The case of fassara illustrates a basic difference in orientation between rhetorician and commentator-reader. (The same person, of course, might wear a rhetorician's hat at one time, and a commentator's at another). Rhetorical thinking about the muḥassināt ma‘nawiyya is most comfortable with logically neat relations, and likes examples accounted for by rigorous definitions. The spirit of the discipline, if such a phrase is permissible, is set against rhetorical discussion of looser (and at times subtler) relations among words and phrases, analogous though they might be to the logically neat rhetorical relations. This is an added reason for the rhetoricians' disinterest in overall composition.

There is a fact that rescues us from having to end up with an excessively neat state of affairs. Ibn al-Atīr describes a figure he calls al-tafsīr ba‘d al-ibhām, which is totally unrigorous.³⁷ His example from the Qur‘ān, wa-qāla l-ladī āmana yā qawmi, etc.,³⁸ would certainly allow the sequence in Hamāsa no. 2 to be described as tafsīr ba‘d al-ibhām. No poetic examples are given. (The verses in the chapter illustrate al-ibhām min gayr tafsīr). Perhaps this is no accident. Ibn al-Atīr was a prosateur. His book contains frequent airings of his own rasā’il. It is, I think, for this reason that he pays more attention, in discussing rhetorical devices, to the informal association of ideas and to gradations of meaning within single semantic categories than do those among his colleagues whose work is primarily with poetry. His willingness to consider the informal association of ideas appears from the examples accompanying his argument against those who assert that the Qur’ān does not employ tahalluṣ.³⁹ His attention to gradations of meaning, as opposed to membership in semantic category, is apparent from his striking demand that in a sequence of parallel phrases or clauses (in rhymed prose) the second should add to the meaning of the first.⁴⁰ Again, the conclusion is forced on us that writers, once liberated from the logical formalism of the rhetoric addressed to verse, could see and note larger (and at times subtler) connections.⁴¹

The search for evidence of contemporary habits of hearing poetry is at times frustrating in the extreme. For instance when, in Ibn Rašīq's anecdote, Abū Nuwās and al-Husayn b. al-Daḥḥāk al-halī‘ yield the palm in a poetic contest to Abū al-‘Atāhiya, they admire their rival's poem for its lightness of words, its malāḥat al-qaṣd, and ḥusn al-išārāt.⁴² I have not the shadow of a doubt that Abū Nuwās knew that much of his enjoyment came from the contradiction between the poem's first and last lines—after all, he liked to write such turnabouts himself.⁴³ But the minimal meanings of qaṣd and išāra do not prove this. In al-Marzūqī we have, at least, some precious indications that the medieval reader could indeed see past the single line and notice larger aspects of composition. This is how common sense, too, would have it.

Notes

1. The most obvious cases are those in which the matter of the poem is set forth in temporal sequence, as in many qiṭa‘ in the Hamāsa, in the idylls of ‘Umar ibn Abī Rabī‘a, etc. Logical sequences (if/then, etc.) are of course linear too.

2. I am using the text with commentary by al-Yāzigī, al-‘Arf al-ṭayyib fī šarḥ dīwān Abī l-Tayyib (Dār Sādir ed., Beirut 1964), II, 202-10.

3. Vss. 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, and 7-8 are very closely linked, by means of parallelism, tafsīr, etc. I shall occasionally refer to such pairs of verses as couplets.

4. Cf. Abū Hilāl al-‘Askarī, K. al-Sinā‘atayn, ed. A.M. al-Bagāwī and M. Ibrāhīm (2nd ed., Cairo n.d.) p. 464 (“qaṭa‘ahā ‘alā kalimati ḥikmatin …”), p. 465 (“qaṭa‘ahā ‘alā ma’alin sātir.”)

5. From another point of view (the obvious one for oratory): a psychological value.

6. Ibn Rašīq, al-‘Umda, ed. M. M. ‘Abd al-Hamīd (4th ed., Beirut 1972), I, 211.

7. Dīwān aš‘ār al-Hāšimiyyīn [al-Šarīf al-Raḍī], ed. A.‘A. al-Azharī (Beirut n.d.), II, 812-15.

8. Al-‘Umda, I, 210.

9. Not a proper name, strictly speaking, but being a title, and a foreign one at that, approximating the effect of one.

10. Al-‘Umda, II, 35.

11. I do not mean to insist on strict correspondences; for example, ṭarīdatu dahrin sāqahā, etc., might refer to the Byzantines' destruction of the fortress in 337 a.h., an event that is not taken up in the next section. Rather I mean that in the next section too Byzantine threat is followed by Muslim success, etc. On the other hand, a “strong reading” might insist on the functional role of the rhetorical figure (tafsīr) that starts off the entire mugmal/mufaṣṣal sequence (the vss. hali l-ḥadatu … al-gamāgimu). Because it stands at the beginning of this movement of thought, it will be felt, on a re-reading, as an overture to its character.

12. Dīwān al-Buḥturī, ed. H. K. al-Sayrafī (Cairo 1963), III, 1072.

13. By no means is the logical figure of sorting something peculiar to this poem. Cf. Dīwān, II, 96, a concluding verse:

    inna l-silāḥa gamī‘u l-nāsi taḥmiluhu wa-laysa kullu dawāti l-midlabi l-sabu‘u

    All men carry arms, but it is not as though all that have claws were beasts of prey.

    This figure is an aspect of the play with paradox, illusion, and bedazzlement, the master-motifs of mannerist poetry.

    Nor is unsorted bedazzlement missing from this poem:

    hali l-ḥadatu l-ḥamrā’u ta‘rifu lawnahā. …

    Hence, only the bundling together of such conventional conceits, or their positioning, leads to pregnancy of rhetoric. There is a vexing danger of circularity: shall we not be tempted to define a position in a poem as significant because it contains a rhetorical figure we wish to interpret positionally? But against this danger we can use the circumstantial evidence of other poems, and common sense. Who could fail to sense a format of fascination projected in Enobarbus' parononomasia?

    The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne
    Burned on the water. …

14. Qaṣīda in a restricted sense—the kind of poem with a nasīb.

15. I mean tahalluṣ in the sense of a smooth transition, as discussed for example by Ibn al-Atīr, al-Matal al-sā’ir, ed. M.M. ‘Abd al-Hamīd (Cairo 1939), II, 258 ff.

16. Iḥsān ‘Abbās, Tar’rīh al-naqd al-adabī ‘ind al-‘arab (Beirut 1971), 18-9.

17. Abū Hilāl, Ch. X; Ibn Rašīq, Ch. XXX, etc.

18. There is an extremely important exception in the ‘Umda (I, 194). Ibn Rašīq writes about the use of internal rhyme (taṣrī‘) at joints in the poem: “when [the poet] moves from the telling of one event to the telling of another (idā haraga min qiṣṣatin ilā qiṣṣa) or from the description of one thing to that of another, he may employ taṣrī‘ to indicate this and to draw attention to it (ihbāran bi-dālika wa-tanbīhan ‘alayhi). The passage is very much to our purpose because of its explicit statement that the poet may wish to use a formal feature to mark a shift in a poem.

19. ‘Abbās, Ta’rīh, 32-4.

20. Dīwān Abī Firās al-Hamdānī, ed. S. al-Dahhān (Damascus 1944), III, 433-35.

21. Dīwān, I, 33-6.

22. Al-Matal al-sā’ir, II, 258.

23. Kāna l-ladī hiftu an yakūnā … rāgi‘ūnā. My text comes from the back of ‘Azzām's ed. of the Dīwān Abī Tammām (Cairo 1965), IV, 677-80. Some variants in al-Sūlī's K. al-Awrāq, cf. the section edited by J. Heyworth Dunne (“Section on Contemporary Poets,” [London 1934]), 203-04.

24. In al-Sūlī's recension, vs. 11 b reads: fī gadatin li-l-bilā rahīnā; a lectio facilior.

25. To be sure, such a deathbed scene too is something of a convention. Cf. Ibn al-Rūmī in the poem bukā’ukumā yašfī wa-in kāna lā yugdī … ‘indī, Dīwān, ed. K. Kaylānī (Cairo 1924):

    alaḥḥa ‘alayhi l-nazfu ḥattā aḥālahu ilā ṣufrati l-gādiyyi ‘an ḥumrati l-wardi
    wa=zalla dala l-aydī tasāqaṭu nafsuhū wa-yadwī. …

    But there is no question that ba‘īd al-dār qarīb al-gār is an omnipresent ma‘nā of elegies; cf. the poem cited from Ibn al-Rūmī (aḍḥā mazāruhu ba‘īdan ‘alā qurbin, qarīban ‘alā bu‘din), or the next poem al-Sūlī cites from al-Qāsim b. Yūsuf, (Awrāq, 204): ḥallū ‘alā qurbi l-giwā / ri kamā yaḥullu l-ab‘adu, etc., etc.

26. Ibn Zurayq, in al-Magānī l-ḥadīta, ed. K. al-Bustānī et al. (Beirut 1961), III, 335-37.

27. Dīwān Abī Tammām, IV, 594-96.

28. Ibn Rašīq's citation of a poem by Abū l-‘Atāhiya in ‘Umda, I, 126. The most nearly analogous exact rhetorical figure is not so much ṭibāq as what later authorities call rugū‘ (“al-‘awd ‘alā l-kalām al-ṣābiq bi-l-naqḍ,” as defined in al-Qazwīnī's Iḍāḥ, ed. and comm. ‘A. al-Sa‘īdī [Bugyat al-īḍāḥ li-talhīṣ al-miftāḥ] (n.d.), III, 28.

29. Šarḥ dīwān al-ḥamāsa, ed. A. Amīn and ‘A. Hārūn, 4 vols. (Cairo 1951-53).

30. Mā qaddamahu tawaṣṣulun ilā bayāni murā‘ātihi amra l-‘ašīra.

31. To no. 6, vs. 4: taraka l-ihbāra ‘anhā wa-aqbala ‘alayhā yuhāṭibuhā garyan ‘alā ‘ādatihim fī l-tanaqquli wa-l-iftināni fī l-taṣarruf.

32. Hā’ulā’i l-qawmu l-ladīna ašartu ilayhim bi-qawlī “fawārisa ṣaddaqū fīhim zunūnī” humu l-ladīna mana‘ū ḥimā hādā l-makāni bi-ḍarbin yagma‘u bayna l-manāyā l-mutafarriqa. Wa-hādā taqyīdun ba‘da iṭlāqin wa-tahṣīṣun ba‘da ta‘mīm.

33. Wa-qawluhu fī l-bayti l-tālī huwa tafṣīlun li-mā agmalahu qawluhu “dinnāhum” li-annahu fassara kayfa kāna dālika l-gaz’.

34. Al-‘Umada, II, 35.

35. Ibid., II, 36 top.

36. Bugyat al-Iḍāh, III, 34: huwa dikru muta‘addidin ‘alā gihati l-tafṣīli awi l-igmāli tumma mā li-kulli wāḥidin min gayri ta‘yīnin tiqatan bi-anna l-sāmi‘a yarudduhu ilayhi.

37. Al-Matal al-sā’ir, II, 27.

38. Ibid., II, 28.

39. Ibid., II, 265-66.

40. Ibid., I, 198. For an excellent example of Ibn al-Atīr's thinking in this way about Qurtānic parallelism, cf. al-Matal, II, 301, on wa-idā qīla lahum, etc.

41. This is not, of course, to deny Ibn al-Atīr the originality of mind that he, unafflicted with false modesty, so frequently claimed. (e.g., I, 198.) Nor was he without pluck: undaunted by great reputations, when he found that in the maqāmāt of al-Harīrī and the sermons of Ibn Nubāta parallelism often failed to augment the sense, he declared them full of verbiage (loc. cit.).

42. Al-‘Umda, II, 126.

43. Poems ending with istigfār, or where an attitude is turned about, e.g., yā sāhira l-ṭarfi … i‘lānu (Dīwān, Dār Sādir ed., Beirut 1962, pp. 606-607).