• Composing Poetry
There is no doubt that Ibn Kathīr’s style was dominated by his roles as Qur’anic commentator, ḥadith scholar, and jurist; he was neither a poet nor a man of letters. It is therefore probable that he composed very little verse, for he regarded the crafting of poetry as an occupation that calls for seeking forgiveness and repentance.

He does, however, transmit a poem by his father that opens:
Sleep has fled my eyelids, so wakeful did I remain—
A lover bound by passion, utterly consumed.
I kept company with the Pleiades and the stars, distraught,
Until, in my rapture, I thought the very constellations stood still.

He comments afterward: “I counted twenty-three lines—may Allah forgive him for what he produced of poetry.”

The biographers confirm this assessment. Ibn Ḥajar writes in al-Ināʾ (1/46), “He composes verse of middling quality,” a judgment repeated by Ibn al-ʿImād in Shadharāt (8/397).

Among the gnomic lines attributed to him are:
The days pass over us in swift succession,
While we are driven toward our appointed ends, though our eyes behold it.
That youth which has slipped away will never return,
And this clouded grayness will never disappear.

Ibn Ḥajar observes in al-Ināʾ (1/47) that had he said “the purity of youth,” the second line would have been more pleasing.

Ibn Kathīr also composed a rajaz poem in al-Bidāyah wa-l-Nihāyah (13/210) completing the list of Abbasid caliphs after al-Mustaʿṣim. Among its verses:
Then Allah tried him with the Tatars,
Followers of the tyrant Genghis Khan.
His grandson Hūlāgū went with him—
There was no escape from what befell.
They scattered his troops and sundered his ranks,
Killed him, his very self, and all his kin;
Laid waste to Baghdad and the land around,
Slaughtering grandsons and forefathers alike.

On one occasion he granted an ijāzah, saying:
I have granted them what I was asked, upon its stated terms;
Its scribe is Ismāʿīl ibn Kathīr.

When judging the eighty-eight-line poem of Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Nāshī, he did so with the mind of a scholar-jurist, not with the sensibility of a refined littérateur, praising it as eloquent—despite its being a didactic work that stirs no emotion—because its composer set out the noble prophetic lineage in metered speech to aid memorization and recall.