John Gillespie Magee Jr.

Magee's Grave, Scopwick

John Gillespie Magee, Junior (June 9, 1922 – December 11, 1941) was an Anglo-American aviator and poet who died as a result of a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire during World War II. He was serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he joined before the United States officially entered the war. He is most famous for his poem High Flight.

Life

John Gillespie Magee, Jr. was born in Shanghai, China, to an American father and a British mother who worked as Anglican missionaries. His father, John Magee Sr, was from a family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania of some wealth and influence—there is the Pittsburgh Magee Hospital and the Magee Building. Magee senior, disregarding family wealth, chose to become an Episcopal priest and was sent as a missionary to China and there met his wife - Faith Emmeline Backhouse. Faith came from Helmingham in Suffolk, England, and was a member of the Church Missionary Society. John and Faith were married in 1921; John junior was their first-born son in 1922, followed by David, Christopher and Hugh. Proud of their origins and wanting to provide their sons knowledge of their Anglo-American roots, John and Hugh's parents resolved to send them, when they were old enough, first to school in England and then to college in America.

John junior began his education at the American School, Nanking (1929-1931). In 1931 he moved with his mother to Britain where he continued his education first at St. Clare's near Walmer, Kent (1931-1935) and then at Rugby School (1935-1939) winning the Rugby School's poetry prize in 1938.

While at Rugby School, Magee met and fell madly in love with Headmaster Hugh Lyon's daughter Elinor Lyon. Elinor was the inspiration for many of John's poems. Though John's love was not returned, he remained friends with Elinor and her family through to the end of his life.

In 1939 he moved to the USA to live with his aunt in Pittsburgh and attended Avon Old Farms School in Avon, Connecticut. He earned a scholarship to Yale University - where his father was then a chaplain - in July 1940 but did not enroll, choosing instead to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force in October of that year.

He received flight training in Ontario at Toronto, Trenton, St. Catharines, and Uplands and passed his Wings Test in June 1941. Shortly after being awarded his Wings and being promoted to Pilot Officer, Magee was sent to Britain and was posted to No. 53 Operational Training Unit (OTU) in RAF Llandow, Wales to train on the Supermarine Spitfire. It was while at #53 OTU that Magee wrote High Flight.

After graduating from #53 OTU, Magee was assigned to the newly formed No 412 (Fighter) Squadron, RCAF, which was activated at RAF Digby, England, on 30 June 1941. The motto of this squadron was and is Promptus ad vindictam (Latin: "Swift to avenge"). Magee was qualified on and flew the Supermarine Spitfire.

Magee was killed at the age of 19, whilst flying Spitfire VZ-H, serial number AD-291. The aircraft was involved in a mid-air collision with an Airspeed Oxford trainer from RAF Cranwell, flown by Leading Aircraftman Ernest Aubrey. The two aircraft collided in cloud cover at about 400 feet AGL, at 11:30, over the village of Roxholm which lies between RAF Cranwell and RAF Digby, in Lincolnshire. Magee was descending at the time. At the inquiry afterwards a farmer testified that he saw the Spitfire pilot struggling to push back the canopy. The pilot stood up to jump from the plane but was too close to the ground for his parachute to open, and died on impact. Magee is buried at Holy Cross, Scopwick Cemetery in Lincolnshire, England. On his grave are inscribed the first and last lines from his poem High Flight:

"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth -

Put out my hand and touched the Face of God."

Part of the official letter to his parents read: "Your son's funeral took place at Scopwick Cemetery, near Digby Aerodrome, at 2:30 P.M. on Saturday, 13 December 1941, the service being conducted by Flight Lieutenant S. K. Belton, the Canadian padre of this Station. He was accorded full Service Honours, the coffin being carried by pilots of his own Squadron."

His biography was written by Hermann Hagedorn in the 1942 book: 'Sunward I've Climbed, The Story of John Magee, Poet and Soldier, 1922–1941.'

High Flight

Magee's posthumous fame rests mainly on his sonnet High Flight, started on 18 August 1941, just a few months before his death, while he was based at No. 53 Operational Training Unit (OTU) in Llandow, Wales. He had flown up to 33,000 feet in a Spitfire Mk I, his seventh flight in a Spitfire. As he orbited and climbed upward, he was struck with the inspiration of a poem -- "To touch the face of God." He completed the poem later that day after landing. The first person to read this poem later that day was almost certainly Air Vice-Marshal M.H. Le Bas, with whom Magee had trained, in the officers` mess.

Magee enclosed the poem on the back of a letter to his parents and his father, then rector of Saint John's Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, reprinted it in church publications. The poem became more widely known through the efforts of Archibald McLeish, then Librarian of Congress, who included it in an exhibition of poems called 'Faith and Freedom' at the Library of Congress in February 1942. The manuscript copy of the poem remains at the Library of Congress.

Uses of High Flight

High Flight has endured as a favourite poem among aviators and, more recently, astronauts.

• Portions of this poem appear on many headstones in Arlington National Cemetery.
• Today it serves as the official poem of the Canadian Forces Air Command and Royal Air Force and it is required to be recited by memory by first-year cadets at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) where it is also depicted in its Field House.
• Songs and symphonic compositions have been based on Magee's text (including Bob Chilcott's 2008 setting, premiered on 1 May 2008 by the King's Singers).
• Many U.S. television viewers were introduced to 'High Flight' when some TV stations ended (and sometimes also began) their programming day with short films based on it. For example, the sign-off film occasionally used by KCRA-TV in Sacramento, California featured the spoken poem played to music and film of Air Force footage.
• Gen. Robert Lee Scott, Jr. included it in his book "God is My Co-Pilot".
• Novelist Arthur Hailey quoted its first two lines as an epigraph for his bestselling novel Airport.
• Astronaut Michael Collins brought an index card with the poem typed on it on his Gemini 10 flight and included the complete poem in his autobiography Carrying The Fire.
• Former NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz quoted the first line of the poem in his book Failure Is Not An Option, at the end of Chapter 16, which deals with the Apollo 11 moon landing.
• The poem was set to music and adapted by John Denver on his 1983 album It's About Time.
• Its use in connection to spaceflight was satirised in an episode of The Simpsons episode "She of Little Faith", with Homer declaring "we are about to break the surly bonds of gravity and punch the face of God".
• The poem itself also appears as part of a display panel at the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa.
• Ronald Reagan quoted from High Flight in his speech that followed the Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986. He quoted: ..."slipped the surly bonds of Earth" to "touch the face of God."
• In an episode of the West Wing ("Those Crackpots and These Women," Season One Episode 5), President Josiah Bartlet references the last line ("touched the face of god") while discussing America's ventures into outerspace and pondering what the country's next great achievement might be.
• The poem also features in the 1993 Russell Crowe movie For the Moment, in which it is recited by Crowe's character, Lachlan Curry.
• Slipstream, a 1989 post-apocalyptic science fiction adventure film, makes frequent use of the poem, most notably by Mark Hamill and Bob Peck, and in line with the film's predominant theme of aviation.
• Paraphrased in the penultimate episode "Daybreak" of Battlestar Galactica.
• In an episode of AMC's Mad Men ("Maidenform," Season Two Episode 6), showing the signoff footage of a television station, used in a scene to establish the late night hour of a tryst.

The poem

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 nor 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.

Sources

The same words that conclude High Flight: 'And touched the face of God' also conclude a poem by Cuthbert Hicks published three years earlier in Icarus: An Anthology of the Poetry of Flight (Macmillan, London, 1938) compiled by R de la Bere and three flight cadets of the Royal Air Force College, Cranwell. In fact the last two lines in the Hicks poem are:

For I have danced the streets of heaven,

And touched the face of God.

This was in a remarkable poem entitled The Blind Man Flies. Of the many poets in this book, Hicks was one of only four that de la Bere was unable to trace and contact. The same book contains a poem by G W N Dunn entitled New World, which contains the phrase 'on laughter-silvered wings.' Dunn also wrote of 'the lifting mind', another phrase which Magee uses in High Flight. Dunn also refers to 'the shouting of the air'; Magee has 'chased the shouting wind'. Finally, Magee's penultimate line, 'The high untrespassed sanctity of space', closely resembles 'Across the unpierced sanctity of space' which occurs in the same volume, in a poem by C.A.F.B. entitled Dominion over Air, also previously published in the RAF College Journal. These many coincidences of borrowed phrases from the same source book suggest that Magee was heavily influenced by it.

Sonnet to Rupert Brooke

Whilst at Rugby School, Magee was deeply moved by the honour roll of Rugby students who had fallen in the First World War. This list of the fallen included the celebrated war poet Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), whose work Magee greatly admired (Magee won Rugby's poetry prize — the same prize that Brooke won 34 years prior to Magee). The poem references Brooke's burial, at 11 o'clock at night in an olive grove on the island of Skyros in Greece.

Sonnet to Rupert Brooke

"We laid him in a cool and shadowed grove

One evening in the dreamy scent of thyme

Where leaves were green, and whispered high above —

A grave as humble as it was sublime;

There, dreaming in the fading deeps of light —

The hands that thrilled to touch a woman's hair;

Brown eyes, that loved the Day, and looked on Night,

A soul that found at last its answered Prayer...

There daylight, as a dust, slips through the trees.

And drifting, gilds the fern around his grave —

Where even now, perhaps, the evening breeze

Steals shyly past the tomb of him who gave

New sight to blinded eyes; who sometimes wept —

A short time dearly loved; and after, — slept."

Per Ardua — The Last Poem?

Shortly after Magee's first combat action on November 8, 1941, Magee sent his family another poem ("... another trifle which may interest you."). Or rather, the beginnings of a poem, never quite finished. Although it is not certain, this poem is quite possibly the last that Magee wrote. Per ardua ad astra is the motto of the Royal Air Force and other Commonwealth air forces such as the RAAF, RNZAF, and the former RCAF. It dates from 1912 and was used by the newly-formed Royal Flying Corps, and is translated as 'Through struggles to the stars'.

Per Ardua

(To those who gave their lives to England during the Battle of

Britain and left such a shining example to us who follow, these

lines are dedicated.)

"They that have climbed the white mists of the morning;

They that have soared, before the world's awake,

To herald up their foeman to them, scorning

The thin dawn's rest their weary folk might take;

Some that have left other mouths to tell the story

Of high, blue battle, quite young limbs that bled,

How they had thundered up the clouds to glory,

Or fallen to an English field stained red.

Because my faltering feet would fail I find them

Laughing beside me, steadying the hand

That seeks their deadly courage -

Yet behind them

The cold light dies in that once brilliant Land ....

Do these, who help the quickened pulse run slowly,

Whose stern, remembered image cools the brow,

Till the far dawn of Victory, know only

Night's darkness, and Valhalla's silence now?"

References

Bibliography

• The Complete Works of John Magee, The Pilot Poet, including a short biography by Stephen Garnett. Cheltenham, Gloucestershire: This England Books, March 1989.

• Icarus: An anthology of the poetry of flight. Macmillan, London, 1938.

• Sunward I've Climbed. Hermann Hagedorn, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1942.

External links

• Magee and High Flight
• Bartleby - Great Books Online
• "High Flight" an example of a modern setting of this poem.