Like other didactic masnavis, 'Attar’s Mosibat-name recounts a series of narrative anecdotes interspersed with hortatory addresses to the reader and didactic interpretation. These anecdotes and their didactic commentaries are embedded in the frame story of a bewildered seeker (salek) who travels Creation searching for a cure for his existential confusion. This sort of didacticism does not sit well with modern literary tastes, which seem to assume that narratives should speak for themselves and didactic interpolations encroach on the readers’ prerogative to interpret the text. And while scholars of Persianate literature may use these didactic sections to unravel 'Attar’s theological, mystical, and ethical world-views (Ritter and Kermani, et al.), little attention has been paid to their literary function. This paper will examine the literary function of these didactic sections and thus take a step towards the underlying poetics of the Mosibat-name in particular and of moralizing masnavis in general. These didactic sections are not mere extraneous repetitions that re-articulate the obvious “natural” interpretation of the narrative, nor are they authoritative decrees that squash the reader's interpretative process, but they are mediators between reader and narrative. They are identical with neither the characters in the narratives nor 'Attar; instead they function as a sort of “disembodied character” in the poem, reacting to the narratives and producing new meaning in the text. Even when these moralizing voices seem to simply reiterate an obvious interpretation of the story, it is never a simple restatement; they usually address the reader directly in a hortatory mood and with moral generalizations, a drastically different poetic mode from the particularized (yet ahistorical), and often extraordinarily comic, narratives. At times the moralizing sections diverge from the narratives not only in terms of poetic form but also content, offering commentary that seems to go against the “natural” interpretation of the narrative. By offering the reader alternating interpretations for these narratives, the Mosibat-name problematizes unitary understandings, and this interpretative confusion intensifies the theme of bewilderment that the traveling salek attempts to overcome in the frame story of the Mosibat-name. Thus, although these didactic sections may seem to be extraneous and heavy-handed moralizing, they in fact create important meanings through their interplay with particular narratives and are key to the mood of the entire work.