He also composed, about a handsome one-eyed servant:
One eye of his has smitten every other eye,
while the other eye has been smitten by all eyes. (1)

Abu al-Hasan ʿAlī ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Jurjānī (2), the judge of Rayy, was a consummate poet (3). He heard hadith, advanced in the various sciences until people acknowledged him as unrivalled in them, and he left behind many fine poems, among them:

They say I shrink from you, yet all they saw
was a man who turns away from the station of humiliation.
I see that whoever fawns on people is cheap in their sight,
while he whom self-respect ennobles, they too will honor.
I have not fulfilled the due of knowledge if, whenever
a craving appeared, I turned it into a ladder for myself.
If someone says, “Here is a watering place,” I reply, “I can see it,
yet a free man’s soul can endure the thirst.”
I did not squander my lifeblood in the service of learning
to serve whoever I might meet, but rather to be served.
Shall I toil to plant it and reap humiliation instead?
Then buying ignorance would have been the wiser bargain. (4)
Had the people of knowledge safeguarded it, it would have safeguarded them;
had they magnified it within their souls, it would have been magnified.
But they debased it, so it became contemptible; they sullied
its fair face with greed until it scowled.

Among his most select verses are also these:

I never tasted the sweetness of life
until I became the companion of house and book.
Nothing is sweeter to me (5) than knowledge;
I seek no other companion beside it.
All disgrace lies in mixing with mankind;
so leave them and live noble, a leader.

Another of his poems, may Allah have mercy on him:

If you wish to borrow money to squander
on the cravings of the soul in days of hardship,
then ask your own soul for a loan from the purse of its patience,
granting yourself a delay until the time of ease.