72 – Ahmad informed us, Abu Bakr transmitted to us, and Muhammad ibn ʿUbayd Allah related to me from a shaykh—one of the people of Kūfa from the tribe of Ṭayy’—who said: “While we were in Kūfa we used to say, ‘Whoever has not memorised these lines of verse is lacking in dignity,’ and there was not a single man of standing in Kūfa who failed to recite them:
[al-Baḥr al-Ṭawīl]
A tawny Jurjānī vintage, round which no self-restrained man had ever gone,
Nor had a cooking-pot hissed above its fire for even an hour;
Nor had the vigilant priest witnessed its blaze by night,
Nor had a rabbi attended while it was being brewed.
Yahyā brought it to me after I had dozed awhile,
When Sirius was shining and the Eagle had just risen. ⦗81⦘
So I said, “Drink it yourself, or pass it on to someone else;
After these grey hairs—woe to you—wine and I have parted ways.
I have kept away from it through the ages that have passed;
How could I play the youth now that life itself is spent?
When a man reaches forty and still has
Neither modesty nor a screen against what he does,
Then leave him be; do not begrudge him what has come to pass,
Even if Time should draw to him every cause of life.”