The motif of ruined abodes ( atlāl) in the nasib, embedded in the landscape of a desert life now distant from the urban Abbasid culture, is transformed into a poetic metaphor, the poet's way of signaling his poem and marking its genre. The journey section (raḥīl) becomes a metaphor for the poetic journey itself: the terrain traversed is the body of the poem. These are the sections that require justification and therefore give rise to the poetic self-reflection and consciousness that I have called referential metapoesis. In the Abbasid age, a poet can only validate his nasīb and his raḥīl by writing in reference to the archetypal nasīb and raḥīl.