Another verse where Abu Tammam goes wrong is the following (meter: ṭawīl):
The places where your tribe once stayed are vacant, I attest,
their traces worn away like the washa’i‘ of a mantle.
He treats washa’i‘ as if they were the bordered edged of a mantle, but this is not the case. In reality, washa’i‘ [sg. washī‘] are coils of thread that a weaver draws between the fibers of a warp in the act of weaving, as in the verse by Dhu 'l-Rumma (meter: ṭawīl):
[The sands] are played by forceful winds that weave it
like a Yemeni whose washa’i‘ weave a mantle.
As for the verse of Kuthayyir (meter: ṭawīl),
The washī‘ on the homes of ‘Azza's tribe is renewed in script-like
patterns [sic]
before all trace of them is wiped away in summer.
He uses washī‘ to mean "stuffing" in an interstice between two things. But washī‘ is thread. [...] What this means is that their homes—specifically, their khiyām [sg. khayma]—were renewed by stuffing [the gaps in their walls with fresh panic grass]. His mistake is due to inexperience of the trappings of settled life. When a Bedouin uses the wrong word for something, having never seen it first hand, it is excusable.
For Abu Tammam, on the other hand, there is no excuse, because he belonged to sedentary civilization, and was hardly ignorant of it. But he grants himself license, [and is flagrant about it,] as you can see in a separate poem where he describes his own poetic work (meter: basīṭ):
Jest and earnest are combined in the enmeshment of its weft,
as are nobility and scurrility with grief and ecstasy.
From The Weigh-in Between the Poetry of Abu Tammam and al-Buhturi by Abu 'l-Qasim al-Amidi
