In the 99th qaṣīdah of his diwān, one of the few panegyrics he wrote, the Andalusī poet Ibn Khafājah (d. 1138) structures his relationship to the mamdūḥ, or patron, through the pre-Islamic poetic trope of the ṭayf al-khayāl (the phantom of the the poet’s beloved). This haunting figure that transcends the dichotomy of subjective and objective and destabilizes the poet’s relationship to reality and language becomes the anchor through which this qaṣīdah returns to evoke the poet’s expectations of the patron. As if to conjure the ṭayf al-khayāl, Islamic philosophical discourse referred to poetry’s power to evoke images that attracted or repelled the listener as takhyīl (“image-evocation”). This definition of poetry recognized the poet’s personal perception as assimilable to the listener’s perception, who consequently constructs, with the guidance of the poet, a specific image of the world. Taking Ibn Khafājah’s invocations to the patron in his 99th qaṣīdah to “see” and “imagine,” this paper highlights the transformative capacity of the poetic image through a reading of the ṭayf al-khayāl that opens and concludes Ibn Khafājah’s qaṣīdah. I argue that the khayāl homologizes the potential of takhyīl as understood by the philosophers not only to conjure the image of the mamdūh throughout the poem but ultimately to move him to act or feel congruent with the poet’s demands. I read, following the Andalusī philosophical poetics’ emphasis on poetry as takhyīl, the qaṣīdah as a form of visual communication which relies on shifting the listener’s (and in the case of the panegyric, the patron’s) focal point as the poem progresses. In aiming to evoke a particular perception of the world through the personal sight and imagination of the poet, this poetic mode of address has a powerful capacity to shape how and what the patron sees. Thus, the transformative power of poetry and the poetic image emerges in the interplay between metaphorical and physical vision, between the physical and mental world which the qaṣīdah navigates in an attempt to affect a material change in the patron’s world. Ultimately, I contend that takhyīl not only reveals how conceptualizations of poetry were continuous between philosophers, literary critics, and poets, but also as its political implications upend the power dynamics between poet and patron, takhyīl offers us a way to understand the role of poetry in al-Andalus.