and You discern the very junctures of its veins within its throat,
and the marrow hidden inside those wasted bones.
Bestow upon me a repentance that will erase
whatever I committed in former days.

He died in Rabiʿ al-Awwal of this same year at Maʿarrat al-Nuʿmān, aged eighty-six years minus fourteen days. A number of his companions and pupils composed elegies for him; eighty dirges were recited at his graveside, until one mourner said:

If you refrained from shedding blood out of scruple,
today you have caused my eyelids to bleed instead.

Ibn al-Jawzi (1) remarked, “Those who lamented him and those who revered him are either ignorant of his true state or astray upon his creed and path.” Someone dreamed of a blind man with two serpents hanging from his shoulders down to his chest; their heads were raised, gnawing at his flesh while he cried for help. A voice declared, “This is al-Maʿarrī the heretic.”

Qāḍī Ibn Khallikān mentions him in al-Wafayāt (2). True to his custom with poets—as we have indicated—he extols the man’s lineage, lists many of his writings, and notes that some people came across the one-hundred-and-first volume of his book al-Ayk wa’l-Ghuṣūn, also known as al-Hamz wa’l-Raddf. Al-Maʿarrī learned grammar from his father, then studied in Aleppo under Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Saʿd al-Naḥwī. Among those who later studied with him were Abū’l-Qāsim ʿAlī ibn al-Muḥassin al-Tannūkhī and the grammarian Abū Zakariyyā Yaḥyā ibn ʿAlī al-Tabrīzī. Ibn Khallikān adds that al-Maʿarrī went forty-five years without eating meat, following the practice of the ḥukamāʾ (philosophers), and that he ordered the following to be engraved on his grave:

This is the crime my father committed against me;
I myself committed no crime against anyone.

Ibn Khallikān comments, “This too stems from the philosophers’ doctrine, for they claim that bringing a child into existence is a crime against him, exposing him to misfortunes and calamities.”

I (the author) say: This indicates that he never abandoned the philosophers’ creed up to the very end, and that he did not renounce it as some have alleged. Allah knows best what is outward and what is hidden.

Ibn Khallikān also records that al-Maʿarrī’s right eye protruded and was clouded, while the left was sunken, and that he was thin of body.

He then quotes some of al-Maʿarrī’s finer verses, among them:

Seek not to gain a lofty rank by wielding weapons;
the pen of the eloquent, without earnest purpose, is but a spindle.
The twin Samāk stars both inhabit the sky—
this one brandishes a spear, while that one is unarmed.