The Composition of Mutanabbi’s Panegyrics to Sayf al-Dawla

The purpose of this study is to identify and describe recurrent patterns of composition in the 22 major panegyrics Mutanabbi wrote to Sayf al-Dawla during his stay at the Hamdanid court in Aleppo between 337/948 and 345/956. It discusses the types of utterance used in endings and in cadential lines before definable internal boundaries, the organizing conventions of the passages that lead into and out of chronicles of military campaigns, the non-random placement of certain crescendo motifs, various means of local organization in poems without events, etc. It also considers brief differences in technique between the Aleppo period and Mutanabbi’s earlier and later work, and casts a glance at possible predecessors. Based on a sizable and coherent sample of poetry, this study demonstrates that compositional rules and predilections played a pervasive role in Mutanabbi’s writing in the years when his career was at its height.