The diwan of the seventh-century Arab poet Jamil Buthaynah is known to have circulated widely in the ninth century, but thereafter was lost. Roughly 800 lines can be reconstructed today, primarily with reference to the eleventh century anthology of poetry set to music, the Kitab al-Aghani. As a result, in Jamil’s surviving poetry, the traditional tripartite structure of the qasidah has been reduced to a nearly claustrophobic focus on the nasib, or erotic prelude, in the individual reassembled poems of his collection. In addition, although there are some signs that Jamil Buthaynah treated a greater range of topics in his poetry, the tradition has reduced him to a poet of frustrated love who returned obsessively to the topic his cousin Buthaynah, who was married off to another man. It is also likely that at least some of the lines that have been ascribed to Jamil were composed by his imitators, or were written by other poets, whose identities were long ago lost, but whose treatment of similar tales of amorous woe have caused them to be assigned to Jamil as well. Keeping these pecularities of Jamil’s text in mind, this paper examines the way in which the poet has recalibrated evocations of the journey (which we would otherwise find in the absent rahil), and has emphasized Buthaynah’s absence with his compulsive address to her (all the more remarkable since the address implied in the madih/hija’ has disappeared). Coupled with Jamil’s recourse to qur’anic language and Islamic references to express the hyperbole of his affections, the anthologist’s scrambling, truncating and re-mixing of the poems makes them seem oddly modern, if not indeed postmodern, and thereby more accessible to the twenty-first century reader.