Just last week I was looking through a book compiled by Tim Peake where he showed some of the amazing pictures taken while he was on the International Space Station. As an introduction to the book, Tim quoted the opening lines of the poem “High Flight” and, as I read it I was transported back to my school days when my English teacher Graham “Gunner” Davies used the poem as one of his lessons.
High Flight is a sonnet written in 1941 by war poet John Gillespie Magee Jr. and inspired by his experiences as a fighter pilot of the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II. Magee began writing the poem on 18 August, while stationed outside London, and mailed a completed manuscript to his family on 3 September.
Magee's poem captures the exhilaration of flight and concludes with a sense of reaching toward the divine.
The poem goes like this………
"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."
