Rumi wrote the Masnavi over the last decades of his life, largely dictated, and it runs to roughly 25,000 couplets of stories that keep turning into theology: a merchant's parrot, a grammarian in a sinking boat, a lover at a door. The opening lines take a cut reed flute crying for the reed bed as the image of the soul separated from its source. Persian tradition calls it the Quran in Persian, a compliment its author would likely have rejected.