This paper focuses on the ornate prose style developed by the sixteenth-century Iranian poet Nūr al-Dīn Muḥammad Ẓuhūrī Turshīzī (d. 1616), who spent most of his career at the Niẓām Shāhī and ʿĀdil Shāhī courts in what is today south-central India. Ẓuhūrī’s corpus includes ghazals, rubāʿīs, and qasīdas, in addition to his influential Sāqī-nāma (Book of the Cupbearer) and Sih Nas̱r (Three Essays). Later biographers group him under the general categories of shīva-yi tāza (“fresh style”) and shiʿr-i bīgāna (“strange poetry”). Seventeenth-century writer Munīr Lahawrī even makes the case that in his poems, Ẓuhūrī pushes meaning’s boundaries further than many of his contemporaries. Despite Ẓuhūrī’s prominence in literary histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—and the extensive reception histories of both the Sāqī-nāma and Sih Nas̱r —his work has received relatively little recent scholarly attention. My paper will address the question of what considering works of ornate prose can contribute to present understandings of the literary movement termed khayāl-bandī by some critics. I will focus on Ẓuhūrī’s use of abstract imagery in his prose works, centering my analysis on the third and most complex of the three essays: Khwān-i Khalīl (The Table of Khalīl). By considering how the author incorporates familiar images and tropes in surprising and often challenging ways, I will argue that the form of the ornate prose treatise served as an arena for the theorization and exposition of literary virtues also visible in his poetry. In the form of a work in praise of his patron Ibrāhīm ʿĀdil Shāh II of Bijapur, Ẓuhūrī composed an exemplary text of a new kind of prose writing in Persian, layering poetic devices and employing increasingly abstract images to the point of near incomprehensibility. To better understand the role of these abstruse passages, I will turn in the final section of my paper to expositions of Ẓuhūrī’s use of abstraction in an eighteenth-century commentary on the Sih Nas̱r. By doing so, I seek to develop a more specific vocabulary for describing the “new style” promoted by Ẓuhūrī and many of his contemporaries, as well as the relationship between poems and works of prose that served as sites for literary experimentation.