«وَقَدِ اسْتَأْنَيْتُهُ بِبَيَانِي حَوْلًا فَمَا أَحَارَ قَوْلًا»[
I gave my eloquence a year's time, yet it produced no answer.
The speaker goes on to describe exhausting his thought over a further period, still without success. Ḥawl is a year; fikr is thought or reflection. The difficulty lies in preserving meaningful syntax while regulating the dotted and undotted status of each letter within consecutive words.
He also sought help from accomplished writers, to no avail. This long failure is the dramatic background against which the elder's confident response is presented.