The Mu'allaqat Poets

The Mu'allaqat are seven long odes of pre-Islamic Arabia, composed in the sixth century by Imru' al-Qais, Tarafa, Zuhayr, Labid, Antara, Amr ibn Kulthum and al-Harith ibn Hilliza. The name means 'the suspended' or 'the hanged' poems: a later tradition held that they were embroidered in gold and hung on the Kaaba at Mecca. Many scholars doubt that story, but the odes remain the great monuments of classical Arabic poetry, opening with a lament at the abandoned campsite of the beloved and moving on to journeys, horses and camels, hunting, war and tribal pride.

This archive offers them in the English of Sir William Jones, first published in 1782 as The Moallakát and reprinted by W. A. Clouston in 1881. Jones renders the Arabic as prose, numbered verse by verse, rather than as English verse, much as Butler's Homer is prose; the site keeps his numbering, one verse to a line.