December 11, 2006
A Footprint on the Sands of Time Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST It was one of those accidents so common in wartime. A Spitfire, descending through clouds over Lincolnshire, England, on December 11, 1941, collided with an Oxford trainer flying from another airbase at about 400 feet. While the Spitfire pilot was able to push back the canopy and jump from his doomed plane, there was not enough time for his parachute to open before he hit the ground. He was killed instantly. He was John Gillespie Magee, Jr., an American serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was 19 years old. He was buried at a nearby cemetery two days later with full honors, his coffin carried by the fellow pilots of his squadron. His commanding officer wrote his parents, who lived in Washington, D.C., to offer his condolences and to thank them for their son’s sacrifice in the cause of freedom. Except for one thing, that would have been the end of it, just one more young life snuffed out by war. With those who loved him now gone too, John Magee would today be forgotten, just as so many of those who died in that now-long-ago war are forgotten. That one thing that gave him a measure of immortality is a poem, a sonnet. He wrote it a couple of months before he died and included it in a letter he sent his parents, noting laconically, “I am enclosing a verse I wrote the other day. It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed.” After his death, his parents showed it to the poet Archibald MacLeish, then the librarian of Congress, and he included it, in February, 1942, in an exhibition of poems called “Faith and Freedom.” From there it spread far and wide, and it is known today to probably every pilot in the English-speaking world and many millions more besides. Today it is, without a doubt, the most famous poem ever written about the joyful sense of power and freedom that can be experienced only in the cockpit of a responsive and eager aircraft like the Spitfire. When the Challenger space shuttle exploded in 1986, President Reagan ended his now famous speech to the nation on the tragedy by referring to Magee’s great poem. “We shall never forget them,” he told us, “nor the last time we saw them, as they prepared for their mission and waved good-bye and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God.” The poem, of course, is “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 ever 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.
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