High flight

See post below for relevance

Dedicated to John Gillespie Magee Jr

John Gillespie Magee Jr was an American aviator and Poet who died as a result of a mid air collision over the fields of Lincolnshire.  He was educated at Rugby school from 1935 to 1939.  He was deeply moved by the roll of honour of Rugby pupils who had fallen in the first world war.  This list of the fallen included the celebrated war poet Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) whose work Magee greatly admired.

Magee's posthumous fame rests mainly with his sonnet 'High Flight', started on 18 August 1941, just a few months before his death.  He had flown up to 33,000 feet in a Spitfire Mk I, his seventh in a Spitfire.  As he orbited and climbed upward, he was struck with the inspiration of a poem - "To the face of God".  He completed it later that day after landing.  Magee enclosed the poem on the back of a letter to his parents.  His father, curate of a church in Washington DC reprinted it in church publications.  The poem became more widely known through the efforts of Archibald Mcleish then Librarian of Congress, who included it inan exhibition of poems called 'Faith and Freedom' at the Library of Congress in February 1942.  The manuscript copy of the poem remains at the Library of Congress.

President Ronald Reagan quoted the poem when paying tribute to the astronauts who died in the Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy.  Today it serves as the official poem of the Royal Airforce and Royal Canadian Airforce.  It must be recited from memory by fourth class cadets at the United States Air Force Academy.

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun split clouds, - and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there, 

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air...

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.

Where never lark, or even eagle flew -

And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

- put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Lest we forget