A Shapeless Mass of Wreck and Rubbish

        I discovered the allusion to Samson when the poem read, "upon the pillars of the temple laid" but finding the allusion and uncovering how the author uses it to create meaning are very different.  To understand some writers you must look at things from their point of view. Longfellow saw the slaves before the Civil War and obviously doesn't see our time when blacks and whites are treated the same. Longfellow is saying that by owning slaves they had doomed themselves. He saw having slaves as an injustice. He creates meaning by using Samson as an allusion to all black slaves. Because the U.S. enslaved blacks, they were destroying their own "temple of liberties" by destroying the liberty of slaves. Longfellow said their government would fall because everything they stood for was thrown in the dust along with human rights. And it might become "a shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish."