The Warning

This poem was a little more on the difficult side for me, not because I didn't know the story of Samson, but rather I felt like you couldn't get by just by annotating it - you really had to think about what Longfellow was alluding to. That's where it got me, allusions are my weaker point. However, I managed to get through the poem and actually understood it! Longfellow did an amazing job with the way he worked the allusion. He really took to heart how awful slavery was and used Samson as an example. Just like the slaves were treated, Samson was stripped of the one thing that really mattered to him: his hair. Now for the slaves it wasn't necessarily their hair, but we see the brilliant allusion here. The two verses within the poem pretty much summed it up as a whole: "there is a poor, blind Samson in this land, shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel." Oh how cruel slavery was.