"The labor and the swallow fly apart" is a familiar idiom, which is often used to refer to couples or lovers separating and going their separate ways.
"Laoyan" does not refer to the hardworking swallow, but two different birds, namely the shrike and the swallow. Shrikes and swallows are two unrelated birds, but in traditional poems and dramas, the shrike flying east and the swallow flying west together form an extremely sad parting picture, which gives people With infinite reverie.
The term "the swallows fly apart after their labors fly apart" first appeared in "The Song of the Shrike Flying to the East and the Swallows Flying to the West" in the "Collection of Yuefu Poems": "The shrike flies to the east and the swallows fly to the west, and they meet each other when Huang Gu is the weaver girl." It is not difficult to understand the literal meaning. Flying eastward and swallows flying westward indicates that the relationship between the two people is broken and they go their own ways.
Huang Gu is the well-known Cowherd. He and Weaver Girl truly love each other but cannot stay together forever. They can only look at each other across the river and wait for the magpie bridge to meet. Whether it was Lao Yan who flew away, or the Cowherd and Weaver Girl who watched each other from afar, they were destined not to live together in this life. In addition, there are also relevant records in "The Romance of the West Chamber" by Wang Shifu, a famous dramatist of the Yuan Dynasty: "I have not understood his music, but I have understood it, and I can clearly understand that the shrives and the flying swallows are in the west and east."
"The Book of Songs·Bin Feng" There is a poem about the shrike in "July": "The rook sings in July, and achievements are recorded in August." The general idea is: Shrikes chirp in July, as if to tell people that the seasons are about to change; in August, it is the time for women to start spinning, making cloth and preparing for cold clothes. It should be said that the shrike was regarded as a phenology and integrated into large-scale agriculture. In the era of the Book of Songs, the shrike was called "Zhao", which can be said to be an ancient bird species.