The Hippopotamus-person Sperm-whale-people is a light poetic form intended to teach a moral lesson concerning rivers, originating in The Bamboo of Enlarging. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is three eighteen-line stanzas. The Hippopotamus-person Sperm-whale-people is always written from the perspective of the author. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines reverse grammatical structures. Each line has seven syllables. The twelfth line of each stanza uses the same placement of allusions as the third line. The sixteenth line of each stanza presents a different view of the subject of the first line. The rhyme scheme of the poem is AABCCABBBCABBBABCC.