Among the poems composed on this occasion are the lines of Abū Qays ibn al-Aslat al-Anṣārī of Madinah:
– One of His marvels was the Day of the Abyssinians’ Elephant:
Every time they urged the beast forward, it would kneel and bellow.
– Their hooked staffs dug in beneath his flanks,
And they had slit his trunk so that it hung in shreds.
– They turned the goad into an iron spike;
Whenever they aimed him on, his backside was left gashed and bleeding.
– So he wheeled about and fled the way he had come,
While all who were present bore the weight of their own injustice.
– Then the Lord loosed upon them a shower of stones from on high,
Enfolding them as spun fiber is wrapped into skeins.
– Their priests exhorted them to stand firm,
Even as their throats gurgled like the bleating of slaughtered sheep.
Another set of verses is attributed to Abū ’l-Ṣalt Rabi‘ah ibn Abī Rabi‘ah Wahb ibn ‘Ilāj al-Thaqafī—though, Ibn Hishām notes, some relate it from his son, ʿUmayya ibn Abī ’l-Ṣalt:
The signs of our Lord abide forever;
None but a stubborn unbeliever contests them.
He created night and day, each
With its reckoning clear and precisely determined.
Then the Merciful Lord draws out the day,
Unveiling it with a dazzling orb whose rays spread wide.
He checked the elephant at al-Mughammis, until
It crawled along like a stricken beast,
Clinging to the ring about its neck,
As though hurled down the slope of Mount Kabkab.
(1) Abu Qays Sayfi ibn Amir al-Asalt was a pre-Islamic (jahili) poet of wisdom who met the Prophet and hesitated to proclaim his Islam, dying before embracing it in the first year of Hijra. The verses appear in his Diwan, p. 90, edited by Dr. Hasan Muhammad Bajudah. Ibn Hisham notes that the same poem is also attributed to Umayya ibn Abi al-Salt (al-Sirah, 1 / 59), and it is likewise found in Umayya’s Diwan, p. 492, edited by Dr. Abdelhafidh al-Sattali.
(2) razm al-ba’ir wal-rajul (‘the camel’s and the man’s prostration’): an expression used when one is too exhausted or emaciated to rise.
(3) al-mahajin: curved staves resembling clubs; al-aqarib (pl.; sing. qurb): the flank.
(4) al-maghul: a slender sword whose scabbard resembles a whip; kulm: a wound.
(5) In manuscripts A and B the verb is yalfahum, but the reading in codex T, in the Diwan and in the Sirah—yuthbit—is preferable and closer to the sense. al-haseb: a violent, dust-laden wind; al-quzum (pl.; sing. quzam): a mean, lowly, small-bodied person.
(6) In manuscripts B, T and the Diwan the word is read tahadhdh; al-thu’aj: the bleating of sheep.
(7) This verse does not appear in the Sirah. There is a variant in the name of Abu al-Salt; see Umayya’s Diwan, p. 33.
(8) In codex T it reads “and it is narrated on the authority of Umayya.” The verses are also in Umayya’s Diwan, p. 391, where their chains of transmission are given.
(9) In codex T, the Sirah and the Diwan the reading is thaqibat.
(10) al-mahah: the sun.
(11) al-maghmas: a site on the edge of the sanctuary (al-Haram); al-‘aqr: the severing of one of a camel’s legs prior to slaughter to prevent it from running off.
(12) In codex T the phrase reads qadd min Sakhr. al-jiran: the nape of the neck; waquttur: cast down from a height onto its side; kabkab: the name of a mountain near Mecca, beyond ‘Arafat.