Waṣf

Waṣf is an ancient style of Arabic poetry, which can be characterised as descriptive verse. This was one of four kinds of poetry in which medieval Arabic poets were expected to be competent, alongside 'the boast (fakhr), the invective (hijaa’), and the elegy (marthiya)'.

In waṣf love poems, each part of a lover's body is described and praised in turn, often using exotic, extravagant, or even far-fetched metaphors. The Song of Solomon is a prominent example of such a poem, and other examples can be found in Thousand and One Nights. The images given in this type of poetry are not literally descriptive. Instead, they convey the delight of the lover for the beloved, where the lover finds freshness and splendor in the body as a reflected image in the world. Other varieties of waṣf include literary riddles.

This genre had a long history and later became a favorite of the troubadour poets and the authors of sonnets in the Elizabethan era. This renaissance literature was popularized by French authors via Italian and was called the blasons anatomiques or blazon (see Italian poet Petrarch). Shakespeare effectively ended this movement with his Sonnet 130 which satirized the form. For instance, the first line in that satire reads, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun." (To read the whole sonnet - which is 14 lines long, as all sonnets are - along with a modern English translation and a critical analysis, see Analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130).