AstroPoppy

High Flight

John Gillespie Magee Jr. · 1941

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.

Magee was nineteen — an American flying Spitfires with the Royal Canadian Air Force before his own country entered the war. He wrote these lines in September 1941, after a test flight carried him past 30,000 feet, scribbling them on the back of a letter home: “It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed.” Three months later — three days after Pearl Harbor — he was lost in a mid-air collision over the clouds of Lincolnshire. His gravestone carries the poem’s first and last lines. Aviators have carried the rest of it with them ever since.

for Poppy — from Dad, August 2026