And I spent the night wrestling with my misgivings about him—
was it a sudden aversion that had appeared, or only a phantom paying a call?
I pondered how the estrangement had come to an end,
and I marveled that reunion had ever taken place.
Love has claimed from me whatever was precious and whatever was slight,
and beauty now possesses all that is grand in it and all that is delicate.
My tears slipped away from the palms of my hands (1)
the moment they sensed the bliss of escaping;
they scattered, fleeing his liberality— (2)
for whoever is overtaken by a torrent fears to drown.

He also composed the following lines for Abū ’l-Najm Hibat Allāh ibn Badīʿ al-Isfahānī, vizier of King Tutush:
Over chargers that bore me along, and through a night that seemed
like the successive arrival of a delegation of cares, or the swelling of a heaving sea,
I split its darkness while the stars appeared as though
necklaces strung by my own verse, or the noble exploits of Abū ’l-Najm. (3)

Abū ʿAbd Allāh Aḥmad al-Tulayṭulī related:
When Ibn al-Khayyāṭ first entered Tripoli, still a young man, he would attend my circle and recite verses to me that I thought beyond his ability. I became suspicious, for whenever I questioned him on any point of literature he could not manage it. One day I rebuked him for a piece he had written and said, “You have no command of prosody or language; so where does this poetry of yours come from?”

He withdrew to a corner, reflected for a while, and then said, “Listen:

A worthy man once said—when I recited to him select pieces,
though all my poetry is select—
‘You possess none of the tools on which one must rely
whose trade is the marvels of verse and lofty oration.
No prosody, no grammar, no lexicon at all—
so tell me, whence comes this excellence and cultured grace?’

So I answered with the words of one whose native talent is sound:
‘Indeed, inspiration is a kind of knowledge that cannot be acquired.’”