Imru' al-Qais
Quick answer: Learn from Imru' al-Qais, master of the pre-Islamic qasida: the ruined campsite opening, chained similes and the long desert night, with practice advice.
Before Islam, before paper was common in Arabia, poems lived in memory, and the most memorised of all belonged to Imru' al-Qais, a sixth-century prince of the Kindah tribe. Tradition calls him the wandering king: exiled by his father for writing poetry, then spending his life seeking revenge for that father's murder. His great ode is counted among the Mu'allaqat, the celebrated 'hanging odes' said to have been honoured at Mecca.
Poets still study him because he set templates that lasted fourteen centuries. The tearful stop at an abandoned campsite, the extended desert journey, the chain of daring similes: these are his signatures, and every Arabic poet after him either used them or, like Abu Nuwas, made a career of mocking them.
Who Imru' al-Qais Was
The verifiable core is thin, as with all pre-Islamic poets: he lived in the first half of the sixth century, belonged to the royal house of Kindah, and his ode became the most famous single poem in classical Arabic. The legends around him, the exile, the quest for vengeance, a poisoned robe from the Byzantine emperor, are traditional stories, told for centuries but not history.
His ode opens with the era's defining gesture: the poet halts his companions at the traces of a former camp where his beloved once lived, and weeps. That opening, called the halt at the atlal, became the compulsory doorway of the classical qasida.
The Signature Moves
Read any translation of his Mu'allaqa and you can watch three techniques operate.
What You Can Learn
The atlal is a portable technology. Set a poem at the physical site of something ended: an emptied flat, a demolished cinema, a dry riverbed. Inventory what remains before you allow a single abstract word. Grief anchored to a location outlives grief declared in adjectives.
Then practise the simile chain. Take one subject in motion and write three similes for it in sequence, each one more specific and more surprising than the last, and keep only the escalation that earns its place. Finally, try apostrophe on something inhuman: address the night, the heat, the delayed train. Direct address to the non-human is one of the oldest ways to dramatise helplessness, and it still scores under creativity when judges compare entries.
Where to Start Reading
Start with his Mu'allaqa in a modern English version; translations of the Mu'allaqat by scholars such as A. J. Arberry, or the more recent versions in anthologies of pre-Islamic verse, will serve. Read it beside the odes of Antarah ibn Shaddad and Labid to see how each poet personalises the same three-part frame. Any good anthology of classical Arabic poetry will open with him, which is itself a lesson in how traditions choose their founders.
What poets can take from this
- Open at the site of an absence and list what physically remains.
- Build similes in escalating chains of three, then cut the weakest.
- Address something inhuman directly when your speaker is powerless.
- Let a poem move through stages: loss, journey, arrival at self-assertion.
- Study a tradition's founding poem to learn what its later rebels were rebelling against.
Try it yourself
Write a poem that begins at a place you once knew that has since been demolished or abandoned, spend the first half only on physical traces, then let the second half become a journey away from it.
Questions
What are the Mu'allaqat?
They are the most celebrated odes of pre-Islamic Arabia, traditionally said to have been hung in honour at Mecca. Imru' al-Qais's ode usually stands first among them.
What is the atlal in Arabic poetry?
It is the ruined campsite of the beloved's departed tribe, where the classical ode conventionally opens with the poet stopping to weep. Imru' al-Qais's version is the most famous.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.