Borrowing from you some noble virtue
that he may flaunt it on the day of boasting.

It is a long, masterful ode, by which he pitted himself against Abū Nuwās’s poem:

O you who dare approach her unbridled grace—
you have no share in her night nor in her evening talk.⦗1⦘

Ibn ʿUnayn remarked, “No one is qualified to adjudicate between the two poems unless he stands on the same plane as those two poets.”⦗2⦘

Ibn al-Muʿtazz relates in The Classes of the Poets: “When this poem reached al-Maʾmūn, he became incensed and said, ‘Find him!’ They looked for ʿAlī ibn Jabala but could not seize him, for he was then residing in al-Jabal. He fled to al-Jazīra and then to the Syrian districts. At last they captured him and brought him in shackles before al-Maʾmūn.

The caliph said, ‘Son of a base woman! Are you the one who declaimed:
All the Arabs on earth …
making us borrow our virtues from him?’

He replied, ‘Commander of the Faithful, you are a household with whom none may be compared.’

Al-Maʾmūn retorted, ‘By God, you spared no one, and I hold your blood licit because of the blasphemy in your words:
You are the one who settles the days in their stations
and moves Time from one state to another.’”} ضمن ⦗1⦘ denotes footnote 1 etc would appear. Probably they'd ask to maintain footnotes; we inserted. The translation ended. We didn't include disclaim disclaim. }