Why do ancient poems often express that people want to leave their wives and stay away from home?

The sound of cold clothes, knives, rulers and anvils reflects the situation that people use their families as production units to meet their clothing needs in a self-sufficient small-scale peasant economy society. In ancient times, most of the materials used in garment making, such as thread making and weaving, were raw materials and had to be mashed to make them soft and iron-knotted, so that the clothes made could be comfortable to wear. Women spread the woven cloth on a smooth wooden board (called "anvil", usually made of stone) and knock it flat with a wooden stick (called "pestle"). This process is called "smashing clothes" or "tamping". Sometimes the clothes are smashed after they are finished. In previous poems, it was also called "smashing clothes".

Women are generally busy with housework and taking care of children during the day, and have free time to prepare clothes for their families at night, and the process of smashing clothes does not need high light, so it is more than the autumn night before the cold winter. In Leng Yue, the constant sound of anvil in the cool breeze is often called "cold anvil", "clearing anvil" or "dusk anvil" in classical poetry, which is used to express the melancholy mood of inviting people to leave their wives and homes. "Cold clothes push knives everywhere, and Baidicheng is in a hurry." It was Du Fu who heard the sound of smashing clothes in Baidi City and thought of the homesickness of women in every household when they were preparing to sew warm clothes for their loved ones.

In the most closely related to people's daily life, "clothing" is put in the first place. Clothing can not only keep out the cold, but also be regarded as a conventional emotional code in traditional poetics, which contains a series of rich humanistic connotations such as missing, hope, concern, attachment, love and mourning for the dead. The sound of smashing clothes is a touching humanistic music. Listening to the sound of the anvil, the women who beat clothes can't help but miss the people who travel far away, worry about their hunger and cold, and provoke constant parting; When a drifter hears the sound of an anvil, he will recall the warmth of his family and add endless homesickness to his chest.

It is one of the main duties of ancient women to care about the warmth and coldness of their families and sew clothes for them. They have enough time to miss their relatives far away when they are doing the repetitive work of smashing clothes.

Anvil tone is monotonous and long, which helps to eliminate anxiety and singleness, and plays a role in condensing and strengthening the feelings of missing. For these reasons, the action of smashing clothes and the related sound of cleaning the anvil have become one of the most common images under the theme of "thinking about women" in classical poetry.