45th Anniversary of High Flight

On August 18, 2016 it will be 75 years to the day since a teenager named Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr. lifted his Supermarine Spitfire Mk I from the aerodrome at RAF Llandow in Wales and climbed “sunward” up into the “long, delirious, burning blue.” He had a tank full of petrol and a heart full of expectant joy. The result of the next two hours was the loss of several hundred gallons of His Majesty’s 100 octane fuel and the visceral inspiration for the literary world’s finest expression of the exhilaration and spirituality of flight—the poem we all know as High Flight.

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.)

“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.”