BIRDS OF PASSAGE by Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

Black shadows fall.. From the lindens tall,...That lift aloft their massive wall...Against the southern sky.
And from the realms...Of the shadowy elms...A tide-like darkness overwhelms...The fields that round us lie.
But the night is fair,...And everywhere...A warm, soft vapor fills the air,
...And distant sounds seem near;
And above, in the light...Of the starlit night,...Swift birds of passage wing their flight...Through the dewy atmosphere.
I hear the beat...Of their pinions fleet, ...As from the land of snow and sleet...They seek a southern lea.
I hear the cry...Of their voices high...Falling dreamily through the sky,...But their forms I cannot see.
Oh, say not so!...Those sounds that flow...In murmurs of delight and woe...Come not from wings of birds.
They are throngs ... Of poet’s songs,...Murmurs of pleasure, and pains, and wrongs, ...The sound of winged words.
This is the cry...Of souls, that high...On toiling, beating pinions, fly,... Seeking a warmer clime.
From their distant flight...Through realms of light...It falls into our world of night,...With the murmuring sound of rhyme.

In this poem, Longfellow compares poets to birds who fly high in the world of sound and rhyme. Doesn’t Longfellow succeed admirably in this rhythmical, murmuring, ‘escapist’ poem?
Too bad frightened and dissatisfied Americans are accused of being Nazis by Democrat politicians, of being ‘well-dressed’ violent mobs (when they are not), of wanting to ‘hurt the President,’ of being divisive and provocative, of being mocking and menacing. Too bad left-wing, progressive Obamamites cannot see through the ‘black shadows’ darkening their view of a Utopian (socialist) America. A Polish philosopher writing in 1978, called Marxism " the greatest fantasy of our century, (that) began in a Promethean humanism and culminated in the monstrous tyranny of Stalin." Many citizens concerned about the present state of affairs in Washington may be oblivious to world history, but what they do manifest is an implicit disapproval of governmental efforts to clip their wings of freedom, to inhibit their poetic songs of liberty.