As an analogy for poetic art, weaving seems a universal figure, and in Arabic it is a venerable one. However, in northwest Arabia of the sixth and seventh centuries CE, weaving was neither a local trade nor an esteemed one, and in the earliest Arabic poetry it is not a dominant metaphor. This paper looks at two trades that are better represented in the poetry of the J?hil? and mukha?ram periods, namely bowyery and diving for pearls. Other crafts and trades are worthy of mention; what distinguishes the bow-maker's and the pearl diver's is the high level of detail with which poets of these periods described them. They are lowly trades, whose products are of high value, and also heroic trades, whose practitioners were subject to hazard and isolation in remote acacia forests and on the floor of the Persian Gulf. In neither art — the bowyer's nor the diver's — is there a robust metaphorical connection to poetic structure or form to be made. Poetic labor, on the other hand, is insistently (if ironically) modeled in the repetitive productive labors of bowyer and diver, and their quest for the perfect end-product. This will be shown in the "Poems of the Bow" of Aws b. ?ajar (fl. mid-6th c.), Muzarrid ibn ?ir?r and his brother al-Shamm?kh (fl. early 7th), and in descriptions of the pearl dive by their contemporaries.