I have a swallow's nest on my shrine, is it good? It's been a few years, I've pailed it five or six times, and it's been up for three or four years now.

Swallows are the messengers of spring, some people sing the praises of swallows as a symbol of love, some people use swallows to express their feelings, some people use swallows to symbolize sarcasm, and there are also two flying swallows to symbolize love. Here is another article: Symbolism and Imagery of Swallows Swallows come from the north in the spring equinox and go to the south in the autumn equinox, and swallows are migratory birds that live with people, and they specially build their nests on the beams of the houses inhabited by people and create a peaceful and calm atmosphere in the residential houses. In Chinese history, swallows have been associated with the history of clans, changes in the seasons, the well-being of families, and the rise and fall of the family lineage, and so they have often been the subject of classical Chinese poems. The earliest poem about swallows is "The Ode to the Shang Dynasty - The Bird of Prey": "The bird of prey of the sky descends and gives birth to the Shang Dynasty, living in the Yin soil. The ancient emperor ordered Wutang to set up the four directions." This is the lyrics of a song used in the temple rituals of the Yin Shang, which recounts a myth about the origin of the Yin Shang clan: Jian Di, the consort of the Gaoxin clan, descended from the Yellow Emperor's son, Xuanxiang, ate an egg laid by a swallow, and gave birth to a son named Qi, who was the founder of the Shang clan. According to the Records of the Grand Historian (史记-殷本记), when Qi grew up, he helped Dayu to "rule over the water with great success" and was appointed by Emperor Shun to be a minister of the Shang Dynasty, who gave him the family name of Zi (子氏) after he was born out of his mother's eating of a swallow's egg. The swallow bird is also known as Xuanbird, so the Shang Dynasty called Qi as "Xuanwang". This is a myth of clan totem worship, which can not be explained by the secular and scientific viewpoints, so it aroused the suspicion of Qu Yuan in the "Heavenly Questions": "Jane Dee in the Tai ?u (Gaoxin's) how appropriate? What is the merit of the bird of paradise to the maiden?" The question is: "Why did Emperor ?a?ryu go to lure Jandi, who was living in the Yao Tai of the Nine Heavens, to send a pair of eggs to her? Why did Emperor ?a?lu send a pair of eggs to Jandi, and why did she give birth to a son after swallowing them?" There is no answer to the question of myth. However, in China, no matter when, where, and of what race or clan, the protection and respect for swallows has become a collective unconsciousness and has been inherited from generation to generation, and it turns out that there is a kind of ancestor totem worship in it. In the north, the season to see swallows is from the spring equinox to the autumn equinox, the swallows build their nests in the spring and feed their chicks in the summer, and some of them stay in the north in the autumn equinox and cannot bear to leave early, which always gives people a warm association. Therefore, many poets use it as a symbol to write about spring and summer. "Swallows come to the new society, pear blossom behind the Qingming." (Yanshu "broken formation") summer it is also close to people, through the clouds to welcome the rain, Du Fu has many poems written about this scene: "the river is flat and less shore, the ghost tree late flowers. Fish come out in the fine rain, and swallows slant in the breeze." (The Threshold of Water) "The rivers and mountains are beautiful in the late sun, and the flowers and grasses are fragrant in the spring breeze. The swallows fly in the mud and the mandarin ducks sleep in the sand. ("Absolute Verse") "The clear river hugs the village, and everything in the village in the long summer is quiet. The swallows on the beam come and go by themselves, and the gulls in the water are close to each other." (River Village) "The fishermen are still in the river, and the swallows are still flying in the fall." (Eight Songs of Autumn Xing) This kind of scene is also not uncommon in Song poems: "In March, the remaining flowers fall and bloom, and the swallows fly to the small eaves day after day." (Wang Ling, "Sending off Spring") "The murmuring swallows speak between the beams, and what is going on in their dreams is a shock to them." (Liu Jisun's "Inscription Screen") When one sees swallows in spring, one knows that a year has passed and a spring has come, but one always wants to find out whether the swallows that come every year are the ones that flew last year or not. There is a line in Yanshu's poem "Raccoon Creek Sa": "There is nothing we can do about the flowers falling, but the swallows return as if they have been here before." In fact, most of the swallows are those that came back last year. In fact, most of the swallows that come back are old friends from last year, and they return to find their old nests. It is recorded in "Southern History - Zhang Jingren's Biography" that the sister of Bacheng Wang Cheng married Wei Jingyu's wife, and after her husband's death, the woman did not remarry, remembering her old love. She tied a thread on the swallow's foot as a sign of her wish, and in the spring of the next year, the swallow returned alone, with the same strand of thread as before, and the woman wrote a poem about this: "In the past years, there were no spouses, but in the spring of the current year, the swallow still returned alone. The old man's favor is so heavy that I can't bear to fly again." This is to encourage her loyalty by singing about the swallow. People with a lot of love and affection would intentionally welcome the return of old swallows every year, proving that they are at peace with each other in seeing each other again. Ge Tianmin, a poet of the Southern Song Dynasty, wrote a poem entitled "Welcoming the Swallow": "In March, spring is at hand, and it is a common people's home. In order to welcome the new swallows, I don't lower the old curtains. The wings are wet with rain and the mud is fragrant with fallen flowers. When the nest is full grown, we will be together for the rest of the year." The poem expresses the idea that swallows are normally bivocating in their nests, flying in pairs and murmuring affectionately. This is a proof of a happy and contented family, a kind of coziness, but it also adds a lot of contrasting loneliness to a separated family. The first person to write such a scene in a poem was Shen Nephew of the early Tang Dynasty. In his "Ancient Meaning", he wrote about a young woman's nostalgia for her husband, who had been away for a long time, "The young woman of the Lu family has a golden hall, and the sea oats are perched on tortoiseshell beams. In September, the cold anvil urges the leaves of the wood, and the ten years in exile reminds me of Liaoyang. The letters are broken north of the White Wolf River, and the autumn night is long south of Danfeng City. Who is the one who can't see the sorrows, and who wants the bright moon to shine on the yellow river?" The woman's loneliness, which she felt from the happy double dwelling of Yue Yan, added to the feeling of sadness and misery. Since then, Song lyrics have widely used this imagery to contrast loneliness with the double swallows, such as ": Threshold chrysanthemums worrying about smoke and orchids weeping with dew, Luo curtains light and cold swallows flying away," (Yanshi "Butterfly Loves Flower") "After dreaming, the platforms of the buildings are locked high, and when I wake up from the wine, the curtains are lowered. Last year, when the spring hate came, the fallen flowers were independent, and the swallows flew in the light rain." (Yan Guidao "Linjiang Xian") Shi Dazu "Winged Swallows" of the Southern Song Dynasty wrote the swallows' returning to their old nests, murmuring, repairing their nests with mud, flying on the ground, and resting peacefully to the fullest extent, and finally reflected the bitterness of the thinking woman, who was "worried about her two moths, painting the fence alone every day," and blamed them for forgetting to give the news of the conscripts to the people from the faraway land of the sky. In classical poems, swallows are also witnesses to the rise and fall of the human world, nostalgic for their old masters and families, and quite unwilling to be a fidelity to other families. In the Tang Dynasty, Liu Yuxi's Wuyi Lane reads: "Wild grasses blossom by the Vermilion Bird Bridge, and the sun sets at the mouth of Wuyi Lane. In the old days, the swallows in front of Wang Xie's hall flew into the homes of the common people." In the Eastern Jin Dynasty, the powerful families such as Chancellor Wang Guan and Xie An lived in Wuyi Lane, but the times have changed, and the Wang Xie family has fallen into disrepair, so the swallows have returned, but without a new master, they have no choice but to look for another place to live. The poem is full of nostalgia and sadness. In the Northern Song Dynasty, Zhou Bangyan wrote a poem called "West River - Ancient Reminiscences of Jinling", which ends with the following paragraph: "The wine flag and the play drums are everywhere in the city, and I think vaguely, Wang Xie's neighborhood, and the swallows don't know where they are, but they are in the ordinary alleyways and strangely in the houses, and they are talking about the rise and fall in the slanting sun." Liu Chenweng, a patriotic lyricist of the Southern Song Dynasty, wrote a song called "Lanling Wang - Bizi Sending Spring" in the spring of 1276 when the Southern Song Dynasty collapsed, in which the geese and the swallows are compared to the captive Emperor Gong of Song Dynasty and the old ministers who were lost ": Spring is gone, who is the most bitter? But the arrow geese sink side, Liang Yan no master, cuckoo sound in the long door twilight. I think