In poem 27 of Attar's Mokhtar Nameh, the bird symbolizes the spiritual seeker whose ego leads it to believe it can encompass and consume the entirety of the divine ocean ('I shall drink all this water alone'). However, encountering even a single drop of this infinite reality is enough to completely overwhelm and destroy the individual self, powerfully illustrating the Sufi concept of Fana (annihilation in the Divine).