He lowered his head and replied, “Here I am.”
She said, “Recite for me those verses of yours—such and such,” naming lines famed for their tenderness and yearning.
“I do not remember those,” he answered, “but I can recite such and such,” whereupon he turned aside from what she had asked and chanted poetry in praise of al-Hajjaj.
She protested, “That is not what I want; I want the other verses.” Each time he evaded her request and recited panegyric to al-Hajjaj until the gathering ended.
Al-Hajjaj then said, “May Allah reward you; you would accept nothing short of nobility and magnanimity.”

Abu ʿIkrima (1) said: “I once recited to a Bedouin a line by Jarir ibn al-Khatafa:

The night has altered so that its stars no longer travel,
or else it lengthened until I thought the star perplexed. (2)

The Bedouin remarked, ‘This is beautiful in its meaning, yet I seek refuge in Allah from anything like it. Let me recite for you its opposite, from my own verse:

A night whose length no slumber shortened,
yet our beloved’s union made it brief for us;
The bliss of love within it blossomed,
until we plucked its fruit from very near;
In a gathering of delight where no complaint was voiced
and no fault of sin recalled;
We feared to sunder it with speech,
so the eyes translated what lay in the hearts.’

I said to him, ‘Give me more.’ He replied, ‘That is enough of this poem, but I will recite you another,’ and he declaimed:

Whenever I knotted the cords of alliance with a people,
I kept them company—loyalty my constant trait.
I do good when their doers of good do good,
and I avoid wrongdoing if they do wrong.
I may will something other than they will, yet I follow their will
and set aside what I myself would will.’

Ibn Khallikan (3) said: “In the view of the majority, Jarir was the more gifted poet compared to al-Farazdaq. The proudest line Jarir ever composed is:

If the clan of Tamim grows angry with you,
you would think all mankind is angry.

A man once asked him, ‘Who is the greatest poet?’ Jarir took him by the hand and led him to his father, who was at that moment suckling directly from a goat’s udder. Jarir called him, and the old man rose with milk dripping from his beard.

Jarir said to the questioner, ‘Do you see this man?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘No.’
‘This is my father. He drinks straight from the goat’s teat so that he need not milk her and let the neighbors hear the sound, for then they would ask him for milk. The greatest poet is the one who boasted of this before eighty poets and defeated them all.’ (4)

There were countless exchanges of verse and mutual lampoons between Jarir and al-Farazdaq—too many to enumerate—and Jarir died in the year