ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 1078 or 1081) revolutionized Arabic-Islamic theories of poetic imagery in his masterpiece, Asrār al-balāghah (The Secrets of Eloquence). The vast majority of the poetic verses he examines contains some form of analogy (tamthīl) or comparison more broadly (tashbīh), including mock-analogy (takhyīl). The psychological effects of these comparisons, and the listener’s process of discovering the intended similarity have been studied in depth (Kamal Abu Deeb, Lara Harb). In this paper I turn to a minority of verses that do not display comparisons, which al-Jurjānī discusses in his later work, Dalāʾil al-iʿjāz (The Signs of Inimitability). Under the rubric of metaphorical predication (majāz ḥukmī or majāz fī al-ithbāt), al-Jurjānī delineates the poetics of such figurative utterances. I will discuss the verses in question and explain how they differ from everyday instances of metaphorical predication. Contrary to al-Jurjānī’s usual predilection for the “new” poetry of the Abbasids (Nejmeddine Khalfallah), poetic instances of metaphorical predication seem to be limited to the pre- and early Islamic era. A hypothesis for the rarity of this phenomenon will be provided.