High Flight
By John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
(A sonnet written by John Gillespie Magee, an American pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War. 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.)
Portions Of This Lovely Poem Appear On The Headstones
Of Many Interred In Arlington National Cemetery,
Patricularly Aviators And Astronauts
"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.
Hovering 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."
