Ten Famous Arabic Poems, Vowelled and Glossed Word by Word

Arabic Vocabulary Lists > Arabic Poetry

Arabic poetry is verse built on fixed meters and a single end rhyme, a tradition running from 6th-century desert odes to Mahmoud Darwish. Below are ten of its most quoted verses, each fully vowelled, transliterated, glossed word by word and translated by us, plus the 16 classical meters, poets by era, and which poems a B1 learner can read.

How to read this page. Every verse carries full harakat, as poetry editions print it, because the meter depends on the case endings (see our chart of every Arabic diacritic). The transliteration follows the verse as recited. A bar marks a long vowel (ā ī ū), a dot marks an emphatic letter (ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ ḥ), ʿ is ع and ʾ is a glottal stop. The "a" of "al-" drops after a vowel, so وَالسَّيْفُ is wa-s-sayfu. The English translations are ours.

The most famous Arabic poems at a glance

We picked ten verses that Arabic speakers know by heart, one per poet, in date order. The last column is our judgement of how far a B1 learner gets alone, and the section after the poems explains it.

Dates are from each poet's Wikipedia entry, such as Imruʾ al-Qays and al-Maʿarrī. Eras, meters and the vowelled texts are from Qafiyah, an open Arabic poetry database, and we checked every text against a second copy, usually Arabic Wikisource.

The ten verses, vowelled and glossed word by word

Each verse appears in vowelled Arabic, then as recited, then word by word, then in our English. A line of verse is a bayt with two halves. The second half starts after the line break, and its last word carries the rhyme that every line of the poem repeats.

1. Imruʾ al-Qays: "Stop, let us weep"

This is the opening of the Muʿallaqa of Imruʾ al-Qays, the first of the seven pre-Islamic odes known as the Muʿallaqāt, and probably the best-known first line in Arabic. The poet asks two companions to halt at the traces of a camp where his beloved once lived. Meter: ṭawīl. Text: Qafiyah, checked against Wikisource.

قِفَا نَبْكِ مِنْ ذِكْرَى حَبِيبٍ وَمَنْزِلِ
بِسِقْطِ اللِّوَى بَيْنَ الدَّخُولِ فَحَوْمَلِ

qifā nabki min dhikrā ḥabībin wa-manzili / bi-siqṭi l-liwā bayna d-dakhūli fa-Ḥawmalī

Our translation: Stop, both of you, and let us weep for the memory of a beloved and a campsite, where the dune thins out between al-Dakhūl and Ḥawmal.

Two grammar points carry over to prose. Qifā is a dual command, addressed to exactly two people. Nabki has lost the final ī of نَبْكِي nabkī (we weep) because a verb that answers a command takes the jussive, so it reads "stop, and we will weep" as one thought.

2. ʿAntara ibn Shaddād: "Why not ask the horses?"

ʿAntara was the son of a warrior of the Banū ʿAbs and an Ethiopian mother, Zabība, and he was raised as a slave before he won his place by fighting. His Muʿallaqa boasts of that fighting to ʿAbla, the woman he loved, and this is verse 43 of its 75. Here he speaks to her by her father's name. Meter: kāmil. Text: Qafiyah, checked against Wikisource.

هَلَّا سَأَلْتِ الخَيْلَ يَا ابْنَةَ مَالِكٍ
إِنْ كُنْتِ جَاهِلَةً بِمَا لَمْ تَعْلَمِي

hallā saʾalti l-khayla yā bnata Mālikin / in kunti jāhilatan bi-mā lam taʿlamī

Our translation: Daughter of Mālik, if you don't know what I am, why not ask the horsemen?

Every verb here is feminine singular, saʾalti, kunti, taʿlamī, which is how you know who is being spoken to without a name. Lam taʿlamī is the past negative: لَمْ lam plus the jussive, which drops the -na of taʿlamīna.

3. al-Khansāʾ: "A mountain with a fire on its peak"

Al-Khansāʾ is the best-known woman poet of early Arabic, and her fame rests on her elegies for her brother Ṣakhr. She lived through the coming of Islam, dying around 645. This is verse 17 of a 36-verse elegy. Meter: basīṭ. Text: Qafiyah, checked against Wikisource.

وَإِنَّ صَخْرًا لَتَأْتَمُّ الهُدَاةُ بِهِ
كَأَنَّهُ عَلَمٌ فِي رَأْسِهِ نَارُ

wa-inna Ṣakhran la-taʾtammu l-hudātu bihī / ka-annahū ʿalamun fī raʾsihī nārū

Our translation: Even the guides who lead others follow Ṣakhr, as if he were a mountain with a fire burning on its peak.

Read the last word as nārū, with a long ū. A short vowel at the end of a line is stretched in recitation so the rhyme rings out, and every transliteration on this page marks it.

4. Majnūn Laylā: "I pass by Laylā's houses"

Qays ibn al-Mulawwaḥ, a 7th-century poet from Najd, was nicknamed Majnūn, madman, for his love of his cousin Laylā, and their story spread across the Islamic world as Layla and Majnun. These two lines are the complete poem as Qafiyah prints it, and they are the best place on this page for a learner to start. Meter: wāfir. Text: Qafiyah, checked against the copy quoted in Arabic Wikipedia's article on him.

أَمُرُّ عَلَى الدِّيَارِ دِيَارِ لَيْلَى
أُقَبِّلُ ذَا الجِدَارَ وَذَا الجِدَارَا
وَمَا حُبُّ الدِّيَارِ شَغَفْنَ قَلْبِي
وَلَكِنْ حُبُّ مَنْ سَكَنَ الدِّيَارَا

amurru ʿalā d-diyāri diyāri Laylā / uqabbilu dha l-jidāra wa-dha l-jidārā
wa-mā ḥubbu d-diyāri shaghafna qalbī / wa-lākin ḥubbu man sakana d-diyārā

Our translation: I pass by the houses, Laylā's houses, and kiss this wall and then that wall. It isn't love of the houses that has seized my heart. It is love of the one who lived in them.

Shaghafna is a feminine plural verb, which looks wrong next to the masculine singular ḥubbu (love). It agrees with diyār (houses) instead, the word the poet is really thinking about. Qafiyah prints uqabbila in verse one; we print the indicative uqabbilu, "I kiss", which describes what he does as he passes.

5. Abū Nuwās: "Cure me with the thing that made me ill"

Abū Nuwās was the foremost poet of the "modern" (muḥdath) style of the early Abbasid caliphate, and the best-known writer of Arabic wine poems. He also turns up as a character in the Thousand and One Nights. This is the opening line of a 12-verse poem answering a critic. Meter: basīṭ. Text: Qafiyah, checked against Wikisource.

دَعْ عَنْكَ لَوْمِي فَإِنَّ اللَّوْمَ إِغْرَاءُ
وَدَاوِنِي بِالَّتِي كَانَتْ هِيَ الدَّاءُ

daʿ ʿanka lawmī fa-inna l-lawma ighrāʾu / wa-dāwinī bi-llatī kānat hiya d-dāʾū

Our translation: Stop blaming me. Blame only tempts me more. Treat me instead with the very thing that made me ill.

The poem never names its cure. Allatī, "the one that", is feminine because the word it stands for, الخَمْر al-khamr (wine), is feminine, and any Arabic reader fills it in.

6. al-Shāfiʿī: "Let the days do what they will"

Al-Shāfiʿī (767-820) founded one of the four Sunni schools of law. Short wisdom poems are attributed to him, and this 13-verse poem on fate is one of them. Meter: wāfir. Text: Qafiyah, checked against Wikisource.

دَعِ الأَيَّامَ تَفْعَلُ مَا تَشَاءُ
وَطِبْ نَفْسًا إِذَا حَكَمَ القَضَاءُ
وَلَا تَجْزَعْ لِحَادِثَةِ اللَّيَالِي
فَمَا لِحَوَادِثِ الدُّنْيَا بَقَاءُ

daʿi l-ayyāma tafʿalu mā tashāʾu / wa-ṭib nafsan idhā ḥakama l-qaḍāʾū
wa-lā tajzaʿ li-ḥādithati l-layālī / fa-mā li-ḥawādithi d-dunyā baqāʾū

Our translation: Let the days do what they will, and be at peace when fate has ruled. Don't panic at what the nights bring, because nothing that happens in this world lasts.

Compare daʿi here with Abū Nuwās's daʿ: it is the same command, "leave, let". The sukūn turns into a kasra because two consonants cannot meet across the "al-" of al-ayyām.

7. Abū Tammām: "The sword tells truer news than books"

Abū Tammām (died 845) is known as much for compiling the Ḥamāsa anthology as for his own verse. This ode celebrates the caliph al-Muʿtaṣim's capture of the Byzantine city of Amorium in August 838, and mocks the court astrologers who had read in their books that the timing was wrong. Meter: basīṭ. Text: Qafiyah, checked against Wikisource, which prints the variant إِنْبَاءً inbāʾan (informing) for the third word.

السَّيْفُ أَصْدَقُ أَنْبَاءً مِنَ الكُتُبِ
فِي حَدِّهِ الحَدُّ بَيْنَ الجِدِّ وَاللَّعِبِ

as-sayfu aṣdaqu anbāʾan mina l-kutubi / fī ḥaddihi l-ḥaddu bayna l-jiddi wa-l-laʿibī

Our translation: The sword tells truer news than books. Its edge is the line that separates what is serious from what is only a game.

The second half turns on one word used twice. Ḥadd means the cutting edge of a blade and also a boundary, so the sword's ḥadd is the ḥadd between earnest and play.

8. al-Mutanabbī: "The horses and the night know me"

Al-Mutanabbī (915-965) wrote his best-known praise poems at the Aleppo court of the Hamdanid emir Sayf al-Dawla, and many of his half-lines are used today as proverbs. Both verses below come from a 38-verse poem in which he complains that Sayf al-Dawla no longer values him. Meter: basīṭ. Text: Qafiyah (verses 16 and 23), checked against Wikisource.

الخَيْلُ وَاللَّيْلُ وَالبَيْدَاءُ تَعْرِفُنِي
وَالسَّيْفُ وَالرُّمْحُ وَالقِرْطَاسُ وَالقَلَمُ

al-khaylu wa-l-laylu wa-l-baydāʾu taʿrifunī / wa-s-sayfu wa-r-rumḥu wa-l-qirṭāsu wa-l-qalamū

Our translation: The horses know me, and the night, and the open desert. So do the sword and the spear, the paper and the pen.

Seven verses earlier in the same poem comes his other famous boast:

أَنَا الَّذِي نَظَرَ الأَعْمَى إِلَى أَدَبِي
وَأَسْمَعَتْ كَلِمَاتِي مَنْ بِهِ صَمَمُ

ana lladhī naẓara l-aʿmā ilā adabī / wa-asmaʿat kalimātī man bihī ṣamamū: I am the one whose writing even the blind have looked at, whose words have made the deaf hear.

9. al-Maʿarrī: "Tread lightly"

Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (973-1057) went blind from smallpox as a child in Maʿarrat al-Nuʿmān in Syria, studied in Aleppo and Antioch, and is known for verse so pessimistic that readers have argued about his faith ever since. This is verse 5 of a 64-verse elegy that opens by saying neither the mourner's wail nor the singer's song helps anyone. Meter: khafīf. Text: Qafiyah, checked against Poets Gate.

خَفِّفِ الوَطْءَ مَا أَظُنُّ أَدِيمَ الْـ
أَرْضِ إِلَّا مِنْ هَذِهِ الأَجْسَادِ

khaffifi l-waṭʾa mā aẓunnu adīma l- / arḍi illā min hādhihi l-ajsādī

Our translation: Tread lightly. I don't think the skin of the earth is made of anything but these bodies.

Look at where the line breaks. The word الأَرْضِ al-arḍ (the earth) is split, with its "al-" ending the first half and "arḍi" starting the second. Poets allow this, and call it tadwīr. It is one reason al-Maʿarrī is hard to read without the transliteration.

10. Ibn Zaydūn: "Distance has taken the place of closeness"

Ibn Zaydūn (1003-1071) of Córdoba is counted the greatest neoclassical poet of al-Andalus. His affair with the princess and poet Wallāda bint al-Mustakfī, and his later exile, run through much of his verse. This is the first line of his Nūniyya, 51 verses that all end in -īnā (us, our). Meter: basīṭ. Text: Qafiyah, checked against Wikisource.

أَضْحَى التَّنَائِي بَدِيلًا مِنْ تَدَانِينَا
وَنَابَ عَنْ طِيبِ لُقْيَانَا تَجَافِينَا

aḍḥā t-tanāʾī badīlan min tadānīnā / wa-nāba ʿan ṭībi luqyānā tajāfīnā

Our translation: Distance has taken the place of our closeness, and where our sweet meetings were there is only our turning away.

The three abstract nouns in -ī, tanāʾī, tadānī and tajāfī, all share one verb pattern, form VI, which means doing something to each other. Once you know form VI, you can guess all three; our guide to Arabic verb forms I to X covers it.

Which Arabic poems can a B1 learner read?

A B1 learner can read Majnūn's two lines, al-Shāfiʿī's poem on fate and al-Mutanabbī's "al-khaylu wa-l-laylu" with a dictionary and the vowels printed. These three use everyday words (house, wall, heart, love, day, night, horse, sword, pen) in an order close to normal prose, and they name no obscure places.

The hard ones are hard for reasons you can name. Imruʾ al-Qays piles up desert place names and words for sand formations, such as siqṭ and liwā, that modern textbooks rarely teach. Al-Maʿarrī splits words across the line and argues in abstractions. ʿAntara and al-Khansāʾ sit in the middle: the grammar is plain, but each line leans on a story you need to know first.

We suggest this order. Start with Majnūn, then al-Shāfiʿī, then al-Mutanabbī, then ʿAntara and Ibn Zaydūn, and save Imruʾ al-Qays and al-Maʿarrī for last. Read each verse aloud from the transliteration before you look at the gloss, because the meter tells you where the case endings fall. For words you don't know, a root-ordered dictionary works better than an app here; our guide to Arabic dictionaries explains which one to use. If whole poems are still too much, the one-line Arabic proverbs, glossed the same way are the next step down, and many of them come from poetry.

The 16 meters of Arabic poetry

Classical Arabic poetry uses 16 meters, called بُحُور buḥūr (seas). The grammarian al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad (died 786) described 15 of them, and a later grammarian, al-Akhfash, added the 16th, the mutadārak. A meter is a fixed pattern of long and short syllables, and every line of a poem repeats it. The names, English meanings and patterns below follow the Wikipedia article on Arabic prosody, which takes them from Elwell-Sutton (1976).

Key: – is a long syllable, u a short one, x either, and uu two shorts that can be replaced by one long. Four meters dominate. In Vadet's corpus of about 2,300 early Bedouin poems, cited in the same Wikipedia article, the ṭawīl carries 50%, the kāmil 18%, the wāfir 14% and the basīṭ 11%. Our ten verses use exactly those four plus the khafīf.

Scanning a line yourself

Here is al-Mutanabbī's line cut into syllables. A syllable is long if it has a long vowel or ends in a consonant, and short if it is a consonant plus a short vowel. The result is the basīṭ pattern, foot by foot:

The last syllable shows why the case vowel is stretched in recitation: qalamu needs a long final syllable to fill the foot, so it is sung as qalamū. Persian poets described their own meters with al-Khalīl's names, but the four favourite Arabic meters are almost never used in Persian. Persian borrowed the vocabulary and kept its own rhythm, a pattern our comparison of Arabic and Persian finds elsewhere too.

What is a qasida? The structure of an Arabic poem

A qasida (قَصِيدَة qaṣīda) is a long poem in which every line keeps one meter and ends on one rhyme. Each line is a بَيْت bayt, literally a tent, split into two halves called شَطْر shaṭr. The rhyme letter gives the poem its nickname: Ibn Zaydūn's poem ends every line on nūn, so it is the Nūniyya.

The classical qasida often moves through three parts. It opens at an abandoned campsite with a memory of a lost love, the nasīb, which is exactly what Imruʾ al-Qays does in line one. It then describes a desert journey and the poet's camel or horse. Then it reaches its real business: praise of a patron, boasting about the tribe, mocking an enemy, or mourning the dead. Later poets kept or dropped the parts as they liked. Abū Nuwās mocked the convention outright, saying in the same poem quoted above that he weeps for wine and not for some abandoned campsite.

Modern free verse, شِعْر التَّفْعِيلَة shiʿr al-tafʿīla, keeps a single foot but lets each line run as long as it needs, and the rhyme can change.

Arabic love poems

Three of our ten poems are love poems: Imruʾ al-Qays, Majnūn and Ibn Zaydūn. The love lyric is called غَزَل ghazal. Majnūn belongs to the ʿUdhrī tradition, named after the Bedouin tribe of Banū ʿUdhra: love that stays chaste and unfulfilled, and wears the lover down. His houses-and-walls lines say it in two verses.

For love poetry you can read today, Nizar Qabbani is the place to go, because his Arabic is simple on purpose. Short sayings are a different thing from poems; for the words people actually say, see our ways to say I love you in Arabic, with endearments by dialect.

Arabic poets by era

Arabic poetry is usually divided by the dynasty in power, with two modern periods added on. The table gives the main poets of each period and where to start. Dates for the modern poets are from their Wikipedia entries.

Modern Arabic poets

Modern Arabic poetry starts with revival poets who wrote classical qasidas on modern subjects, then changes shape in 1947 with free verse. These six are the names you will meet first. Their poems are still in copyright, so we describe them rather than quote them.

• Aḥmad Shawqī (أَحْمَد شَوْقِي, Egypt, 1868-1932) was given the title Prince of Poets. He kept the classical meters and rhyme, was exiled to Spain by the British from 1914 to 1920, and wrote a long poem on the history of Islam. He reads like a classical poet who happened to live in the 20th century.
• Nāzik al-Malāʾika (نَازِك المَلَائِكَة, Iraq, 1923-2007) wrote "al-Kūlīrā" (The Cholera, 1947), which critics call a revolution in modern Arabic poetry because it dropped the single meter and rhyme.
• Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb (بَدْر شَاكِر السَّيَّاب, Iraq, 1926-1964) is counted with al-Malāʾika as a founder of free verse. His best-known work is "Unshūdat al-maṭar" (Rain Song, 1960).
• Nizar Qabbani (نِزَار قَبَّانِي, Syria, 1923-1998) wrote love and political poetry in deliberately plain Arabic. That plainness makes him the easiest major poet for learners, and Kadim Al Sahir is the best known of the singers who perform his poems.
• Mahmoud Darwish (مَحْمُود دَرْوِيش, Palestine, 1941-2008) is regarded as the Palestinian national poet and wrote the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence. His early poems include "Biṭāqat huwiyya" (Identity Card, 1964).
• Adonis (أَدُونِيس, Syria, born 1930) led the modernist turn of the second half of the 20th century and is the hardest of the six for a learner.

Qabbani and Darwish are also the easiest way to hear modern poetry, because their verse is sung in Modern Standard Arabic. Our Arabic songs for learners includes the singers who perform them.

Frequently asked questions

What is the most famous Arabic poem?

The Muʿallaqa of Imruʾ al-Qays, a 6th-century ode of 78 verses that opens with qifā nabki (stop, let us weep). It is the first of the seven Muʿallaqāt, the pre-Islamic odes later anthologies treated as the best of early Arabic verse, and Arabic speakers still recognise its first line instantly. Al-Mutanabbī's line al-khaylu wa-l-laylu (the horses and the night know me) is the most quoted single verse.

Who is the greatest Arab poet of all time?

Al-Mutanabbī (915-965) is the usual answer. He wrote praise poems for Sayf al-Dawla in Aleppo, and many of his lines are still used as proverbs. Imruʾ al-Qays is named first for the pre-Islamic period, and Mahmoud Darwish or Ahmad Shawqi for the modern one.

What is Arabic poetry called?

Poetry is shiʿr (شعر) and a poet is a shāʿir (شاعر). A long poem with one meter and one rhyme is a qaṣīda (قصيدة), a short piece is a qiṭʿa (قطعة), and a single line is a bayt (بيت), literally a tent. The meters are called buḥūr (بحور), seas.

What is a Qasida?

A qasida is a long Arabic poem in which every line uses the same meter and ends on the same rhyme. Each line, a bayt, has two halves. The classical qasida often opens by stopping at an abandoned campsite and remembering a lost love, then describes a desert journey, then reaches its real purpose: praise, boasting, satire or mourning.

Is the Quran a poetry?

No. The Quran is not written in any of the 16 poetic meters, and it rejects the label itself: Quran 69:41 says it is not the word of a poet. Its short rhyming verses resemble sajʿ, the rhymed prose of pre-Islamic Arabia, but Muslim scholars treat it as a category of its own, neither poetry nor ordinary prose.

Keep learning Arabic

• Arabic Vocabulary Lists & Anki DecksFour free Arabic vocabulary lists: Al Kitaab, A New Arabic Grammar, Quran ayat and the 99 Names, each as a printable file and a ready-made Anki deck.
• How to Pronounce the Arabic Letters English Doesn't HaveArabic pronunciation for English speakers: where each hard letter is made, word pairs that test it, native audio, and how dialects change the qaf and jim.
• 40 Arabic Proverbs and Sayings, Word by Word40 Arabic proverbs and sayings in script and transliteration, glossed word by word, with the English equivalent, when to say each, and the book it comes from.
• Basic Arabic Sentences: 50 Patterns You Can Reuse50 basic Arabic sentences grouped by the pattern each teaches, fully vowelled, glossed word by word, with the Egyptian and Levantine way to say every one.