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 windswept 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.

Photo by Paul L. Hayden, Lake Superior Magazine

John Gillespie Magee Jr. was an American/British fighter pilot who flew Spitfires with the 412 Squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Force in Britain during World War II. Like Poplar, Wisconsin's Richard Ira Bong, the U.S. ace pilot who flew in the Pacific theater (see this issue's "Lake Superior Journal,"), Magee was inspired by his flying. "High Flight" was written on the back of a letter to his parents. He wrote, "I am enclosing a verse I wrote the other day. It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed." Again like the hero Bong, who was killed during a test flight in 1945, Magee died during a training fight from the Scopwick, Lincolnshire, airfield on December 11, 1941. He was 19 years old at the time.

His poem has become the inspiration of pilots ever since it was first released.