Blue Monday #11: Slipping the Surly Bonds

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"High Flight"
Atlantic Beach, NC - October 2008 (Click to embiggen)

 Hosted by Smiling Sally

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Every time I see a bird of any size from this angle, I'm reminded of the poem High Flight, a sonnet written by John Gillespie Magee, a 19-year-old pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. According to The "Quote ... Unquote" Newsletter

He came to Britain, flew in a Spitfire squadron, and was killed at the age of nineteen on 11 December 1941 during a training flight from the airfield near Scopwick.

The sonnet was written on the back of a letter to his parents which stated, 'I am enclosing a verse I wrote the other day. It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed.' The parents were living in Washington, DC, at the time of his death and, according to the Library of Congress book Respectfully Quoted, the poem came to the attention of the Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish, who acclaimed Magee as the first poet of the war.

I remember the verse best from my childhood when the US Air Force used it in recruiting ads on TV. If my dim memories of those ads is correct, the poem was a voiceover for a series of clips involving an F-104 Starfighter, and was the only spoken copy in the entire commercial. To this day, I get chills when I hear it or read it. Or even think it... as I did when I took this shot.

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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 falls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor eer 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.

- John Gillespie Magee, RCAF

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