“Were youth a stone,” laments Adunis in his Introduction to Arabic Poetry. Recalling the verses of the Jahiliyah poets, Adunis echoes their praise for the stone’s impervious nature and its capability to withstand the vicissitudes of time. The beginnings of Arabic poetry take root in the dialogue between the poet and “mute immortals”, that is the stones that marked the ruins of the beloved’s campsite. In Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi, Adunis raises the stone as a mirror to reveal the resilience of the poetic tradition as well as an opportunity to pulverize it and—from its broken fragments and shards—create language and poetry anew. This paper explores the poetic schema of the stone in Adunis’s poetry, but also in how it resonates with the poetic tradition of the Abbasids which extends to the Jahiliyah. While the stone for Adunis is the sedimentation of tradition that contains the potential for a new poetic language, the stone for Abu Tammam constitutes a volatile substance which he could transform into water, a necessary figure of speech to the badi? style for which he was known. Thus, the stone is at once a metaphor employed by the ancients and a metaphor for poetic tradition itself. By reading the metaphor of the former through that of latter, I argue that the stone operates upon a larger metaphorical structure based on the ambiguous nature of its substance between two different states: static/dynamic, solid/liquid, stillness/motion, tradition/modernity. For Adunis, this metaphor is both rooted in the tradition and generated by creativity.    While previous scholarship has treated Modernist Arabic poetry and its relationship to the tradition of the ?Abbasid muhdathun, this paper identifies a pattern that draws attention to the study of isti?arah (metaphor) in the Arabic poetic tradition. Far from becoming obsolete, this paper reorients the significance of metaphor in the development of Modernist Arabic poetry in the 20th century.