‘Umar b. Laja’ said (meter: ṭawīl):
Some poetry is like sheep manure, strewn disjointedly
by the tongue of a poseur whose verse is meager.
because sheep's dung falls in unconnected pellets. Al-Mubarrad said: "I am informed that ‘Umar b. Laja’ said to a cousin of his: 'Between the two of us, I am the better poet.'
"'How so?' his cousin asked.
"'Whereas I follow one verse with its brother, you say a verse and then its cousin.'"
Someone asked Jarir about the poetry of Dhu 'l-Rumma, and he said: "It is like gazelle's dung, and the dottings of [henna on the hands of] a bride," meaning that it is oddly formed and comes out unevenly.
[By way of another interpretation of this remark,] al-Asma‘i said: "'The poetry of Dhu 'l-Rumma is sweet when you first hear it, but gets weaker the more it is recited, and loses its beauty.' This is because when you first smell gazelle's dung, [freshly laid,] it is redolent of the aromatic plants on which the animal feeds. But as time goes by, it loses that fragrance, the way the 'dottings of a bride' are washed off."
From A Selection of Figurative and Allegorical Expressions of the Scholars and Rhetoricians by Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Jurjani
