Attar of Nishapur
Quick answer: Attar of Nishapur built The Conference of the Birds from nested parables. A craft guide to allegory, frame stories and the pun that lands the ending.
Attar of Nishapur kept a pharmacy. His name means the perfumer or apothecary, and tradition pictures him composing poetry between customers. Living from around 1145 to around 1221, when Nishapur fell to the Mongol invasion, he wrote the most architecturally perfect allegory in Persian literature: Mantiq al-Tayr, The Conference of the Birds.
The poem's design is famous for good reason. The birds of the world, seeking a king, travel through seven valleys to find the legendary Simorgh. Thirty birds survive the journey, and at the throne they discover the secret hidden in plain sight all along: in Persian, si morgh means 'thirty birds'. They were seeking themselves. An entire epic resolves on a pun, and the pun carries the theology.
Who Attar Was
Attar lived and worked in Nishapur, in Khorasan, and unlike most Persian poets of his rank he apparently never depended on court patronage; the pharmacy paid for the poetry. Besides The Conference of the Birds he wrote other long mystical poems, including the Ilahi-Nama, and a beloved prose work, the Tadhkirat al-Awliya or Memorial of the Saints, which preserves the sayings and stories of earlier Sufis, including Rabia of Basra.
Rumi, born a generation later, revered him, and tradition records the older poet's influence on the younger. Attar is the essential bridge between early Sufi piety and the great flowering of Persian mystical poetry that followed him.
The Signature Moves
Attar's craft is structural above all.
What You Can Learn
Learn from the objection-and-answer engine. Structure a poem as a series of excuses, yours or your speaker's, each answered not by argument but by a tiny story or image. This dramatises inner conflict without a line of abstract self-analysis.
Plan a convergent ending. Attar knew his pun before he wrote his poem; the whole structure walks toward it. Try writing toward a final image or double meaning chosen in advance, and let every section earn its arrival. Endings discovered in advance and concealed until the last line feel inevitable rather than clever, and inevitability is what makes a judge reread an entry.
Where to Start Reading
The Conference of the Birds is available in strong English versions, notably the verse translation by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis and the freer rendering by Sholeh Wolpe. Read the frame first, then dip into individual parables. The Memorial of the Saints, in A. J. Arberry's English selection, makes an ideal companion, and leads naturally on to Rumi.
What poets can take from this
- Answer abstract doubts with tiny stories, not counter-arguments.
- Choose your ending first for long poems, then build the road to it.
- Give each section of a sequence its own named stage or station.
- Let a frame narrative carry meaning, not merely contain it.
- Keep embedded anecdotes short enough to survive on their own.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in which five different voices each give one excuse for refusing a difficult journey, and a sixth voice answers each excuse with a two-line story instead of an argument.
Questions
What happens in The Conference of the Birds?
The world's birds, guided by the hoopoe, cross seven valleys in search of the Simorgh, their king. Thirty birds arrive and find the Simorgh is themselves: si morgh means 'thirty birds' in Persian.
What are the seven valleys in Attar's poem?
They are quest, love, understanding, detachment, unity, bewilderment and annihilation, stages of the soul's journey that give the allegory its structure.
How did Attar influence Rumi?
Rumi grew up in Attar's shadow and honoured him openly; tradition even records a meeting between Attar and Rumi's family. Attar's blend of frame story, parable and mystical teaching became the model Rumi's Masnavi developed further.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.