"Sing, sing in soaring grace, oh Lark"

.....One day in late August or early September, 1941, a 19-year-old Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot named John Gillespie Magee, Jr., who was then serving with the No. 412 Squadron in Royal Air Force Digby, England, sent a letter to his parents. “I am enclosing a verse I wrote the other day,” he began. “It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed.” The verse, or “ditty,” as Magee later refers to it, was a sonnet titled “High Flight,” a fourteen-line paean to the sublimity and sheer joy of flight felt by Magee during a solo run in his Spitfire aircraft. Magee’s aunt helped get the poem published in the November 12th issue of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where it may have remained known to a limited readership had not tragedy struck.

 

.....It was December 11th, only a few months after Magee—a United States citizen who had joined the RCAF in 1940 before the U.S. entered World War II—had written “High Flight.” Returning to base with his squadron after participating in a successful training exercise, Magee’s Spitfire collided with an Airspeed Oxford piloted by Ernest Aubrey Griffin. Both Magee and Griffin were killed. Within days of Magee’s death, “High Flight” had been reprinted in newspapers across the U.S. Soon after, the RCAF began distributing plaques with the text of the poem to British and Canadian airfields and training stations. And before long, copies of the poem could be found in the pockets of many U.S., Canadian, and British fighter pilots.  (Story from Expedia)

 

.....I also found a copy of the poem in a British newspaper in 1942.

 

HIGH FLIGHT

 

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

And danced the sky on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

On 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 windswept heights with easy grace

Where never lark or even eagle flew

And while with silent lifting mind I've trod

 

The high untresspassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

 

It's a spirited poem, and I know whereof he speaks even though I was not a Spitfire pilot.  It calls back the unmitigated joy of flight. To continue this post is difficult; I want to continue with the mood.