Note 385 — KAMAR AL-ZAMAN AND THE JEWELLER’S WIFE.[375]

i.e. He wrote “Kasídahs (= odes, elegies) after the fashion of the “Suspended Poems” which mostly open with the lover gazing upon the traces of the camp where his beloved had dwelt. The exaggerated conventionalism of such exordium shows that these early poems had been preceded by a host of earlier pieces which had been adopted as canons of poetry.