These words are the transcript of a mood.  The writer is not unfolding to us any of the deep persistent longings of his spirit; he is telling us of a thought that shadowed his soul for an hour.  Let us look into this mood of his.  It is not his in any unique or even peculiar sense.  In moods, as in manners, history is wont to repeat itself.  The writer of this poem has voiced one of the great common experiences of humanity.  But let us be quite clear as to what that experience really is.  Let us not be misled by the music and the seeming unworldliness of these words about winged flight from a world of trouble and strife.  The Psalmist was not looking heavenward, but earthward, when this plea for wings broke from his heart.  He was moved to speak as he did, not by the surpassing charm of a heavenly vision, but by the dark unrest of the earthly outlook.  The emphatic note here is that of departure, not of destination.  It is necessary to remind ourselves that this is so, for these words have become the classic of the home-sick soul.  They have been used to voice the farthest and most truly divine desires of the human heart.  And by virtue of such use they have gathered a meaning which was not theirs at the beginning.  At that meaning we will presently look, but let us first of all look at this longing as it stands in the psalm and as it represents an experience that is threaded through the history of humanity.

Oh that I had wings ... then would I fly away. Here the idea of fleeing away suggests itself as a possible solution of life; and whenever it comes to a man like this it is a source of weakness.  It is not a desire to find the joys of heaven; it is a desire to escape the pains of earth.  There is no vista, no wistful distance, no long, alluring prospect.  The soul is hemmed in by its enemies, crushed down by its burdens, beset on all sides by the frets of the earthly lot; and there comes a vague desire to be out of it all.  It is not aspiration, it is evasion.  It is not response to the ideal, it is recoil from the actual.  It is not the spell of that which shall be that is upon the soul, but the irksomeness or the dreadfulness of that which is.  This is a mood that awaits us all.  No man faces life as it should be faced, but some can hardly be said to face it at all.  Their face is ever turned towards a seductive vision of quietness.  The solution of life for them is not in a fight, but in a retreat.  Of course we know there is no going back, and no easy deliverance from the burden and the battle, but in the thick of any fight there is a great difference between the man who wants victory and the man who merely wants a cessation of hostilities.