Home > Characters > The swallows, visitors to the mansions of those noble famili

Jiushi wangxie tangqian yan, feiru xunchang baixing jia (The swallows, visitors to the mansions of those noble families in the bygone days, are flying into the houses of ordinary people)

The poet took hold of the characteristic of swallows that leave in autumn and return in spring to their old nests, and gave utterance to his nostalgia. The lines are from Black Attire Lane, a poem written by Liu Yuxi, a famous Tang poet:
Wild flowers and weeds overgrown
by the Bridge of Scarlet Sparrow,
the sun sinks on the entrance
to the Black Attire Lane.
The swallows, visitors
to the mansions of those noble families
in the bygone days, are flying
into the houses of ordinary people.

In the poem, the swallows unintentionally witnessed the vicissitudes of the world and spoke for the poet his agony over the defeated country and lost homes.