أَمْ يَقُولُونَ شَاعِرٌ نَّتَرَبَّصُ بِهِۦ رَيْبَ ٱلْمَنُونِ
Am yaqooloona shaa'irun natarabbasu bihee raibal manoon
If they say, ‘He is only a poet: we shall await his fate,’
Or do they say, "He is a poet — we await some misfortune of time to strike him"?
The phrase they reach for, rayb al-manūn, is stock pre-Islamic poetry for the blows of fate that wear a man down, so the accusation of being a poet is made in a poet's own idiom. Their word for fate appears only here, built on the stem that elsewhere describes a reward never cut off, at 41:8 and 95:6. Waiting for time to finish him is being offered as an argument.