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tags: Poetry
rel: Wild Geese Returning - Chinese Reversible Poems by Michele Metail
Is the posthumous title given to a 4th-century Chinese poem written by the Sixteen Kingdoms poet Su Hui for her husband. It consists of a 29 by 29 grid of characters, forming a reversible poem that can be read in different ways to form roughly 3,000 smaller rhyming poems.
Later sources described the whole grid of 840 characters (not counting the central character 心 xin, meaning “heart”, which lends meaning to the whole but is not part of any of the smaller poems).
While sources agree that Su was a talented poet, the background story and interpretation of the poem changed over the centuries, from the lament of a wife longing for her husband, to a wife worrying about her husband fighting on the frontier, to a jealous wife competing for her husband’s affections.
