Introduction to the Study of The Holy Quran — Page 224
224 really died. But no sooner had he realised it, than his legs began to tremble and give way. He fell down exhausted. The man who wanted to terrorise Abu Bakr with his bare sword had been converted by Abu Bakr’s speech. The Companions felt the verse had been revealed for the first time on that day, so strong and so new was its appeal. In a paroxysm of grief, they forgot that the verse was in the Quran. Many expressed the grief which overtook Muslims on the death of the Prophet, but the pithy and profound expression which Hassan, the poet of early Islam, gave to it in his couplet remains to this day the best and the most enduring. He said: ‘Thou wast the pupil of my eye. Now that thou hast died my eye hath become blind. I care not who dies now. For I feared only thy death. ' This couplet voiced the feeling of every Muslim. For months in the streets of Medina men, women and children went about reciting this couplet of Hassan bin Thabit.