33 pages • 1 hour read
Farid ud-Din AttarThe Conference of the Birds
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 213-229Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 213-229 Summary
The hoopoe finally finishes describing the Seven Valleys, and every bird is filled with a trembling fear. Some are so afraid that they perish in despair on the spot, but other birds rise up and the flock departs on its journey. The flock travels for what seems like years. The speaker does not relay what happens on the journey, but very few survive the Way: one bird out of every thousand. Some birds die from exposure to the elements, some by predators, some due to hunger or thirst, and some are too weak to fly any longer. At the end of this description, the speaker revises his figure: one in every 100,000 birds survive the journey.
The remaining thirty birds arrive at to the Simorgh. They are “exhausted, wretched, broken things” (214) and wait a very long time for the Simorgh to greet them. A herald appears and asks them a number of questions about their journey, and the birds request to see the Simorgh. The herald tells the birds to turn back but the birds persist. They narrate the moth’s tale for the herald. The herald eventually relents and unlocks the palace door. He leads them to a throne and tells them to read a sheet of paper, saying that the meaning of their journey will be revealed once they’ve finished.
The birds read through the page, which details all the actions and stages of their lives. It is also written that they were implicated in selling the biblical Joseph into slavery, which causes their spirits to crumble and shrink with shame. Out of this moment, they felt a new life flow towards them as a bright “Celestial and ever-living Light” (218). They finally see the Simorgh’s face, which they recognize as their own. They ask why they are not distinguished as separate entities from the Simorgh, and he replies “I am a mirror set before your eyes/And all who come before my splendor see/Themselves, their own unique reality” (219). The Simorgh has been within the birds all along.
Pages 213-229 Analysis
Up to this point, the poem has been a dialogue between the hoopoe and the birds, and the action of the poem takes place entirely within this final section. The journey itself is very short and mostly details how many birds died along the way, until only thirty were left. The length of time it takes the reader to encounter action in this poem is intentional: Attar is illustrating for his audience the amount of preparation and contemplation they should complete before embarking on their own spiritual journey. At the same time, Attar uses this structure to communicate that his audience should take the Sufi path; they are like the thirty birds, out of the original 300,000, that arrive at the Simorgh’s gates.
Attar takes great care to describe birds as both emotionally and physically war-torn. They have both “hopeless hearts” and “tattered, trailing wings” (214). Though in dire states, they are the ones who “saw that nameless Glory which the mind/ Acknowledges as ever-undefined” (215). These details signify the bitter fight in one’s own soul to arrive at an enlightened state that is both nameless and eluding definition.
The hoopoe is emphatically absent in the final stage of the journey. The birds have reached the status of sheikh, and no longer need guidance from the hoopoe. This is illustrated through the exchange between the herald and the birds. Though the herald stubbornly tells the birds to turn back, they act resiliently and are finally submitted to the throne room, with no assistance from their former guide.
In order to reach the realization that the Simorgh was within them, and there is no distinction between God and the world, the birds had to be implicated in the betrayal of Joseph. In the biblical story, Joseph was hidden in a well and sold to Egypt by his brothers. By figuratively implicating the birds in this story, Attar makes time, identity, and blame encompass all beings. It is only here where the birds are truly humbled by shame, but only in this shame can their spirits be “refined” (218) so that they may reach enlightenment.
The poem ends with two final fables: “the ashes of Hallaj,” and “the king who ordered his beloved to be killed.” In the first story, the Sufi Hallaj is executed for crying out “I am the Truth” in a state of religious exaltation. This story simultaneously illustrates the birds’ realization of the Simorgh-as-self and draws attention to the persecution of Sufis. The second story ends by drawing attention to the poet himself. The characters reach a state of enlightenment: “They knew that state of which no man can speak; This pearl cannot be pierced; we are too weak” (229). The stringing of pearls on a necklace is a stock metaphor in Persian verse for writing poetry, so Attar is suggesting that truly describing an enlightened state is, even at the end of his epic poem, too complex to put into language.
