John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
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Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Junior (June 9, 1922 – December 11, 1941) was an American aviator and poet who died fighting in World War II while serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he had joined before the United States had officially entered the war.
Magee was born in Shanghai, China to an American father and a British mother who worked as Anglican missionaries. His father, John Gillespie Magee, was an American from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania whose family was of some wealth and influence - there is the Pittsburgh Magee Hospital and the Magee Building. Magee, 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.
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. 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 training in flying in Ontario at Toronto, Trenton, St. Catharines, and Uplands and passed his Wings Test in June 1941. He was sent to England initially to a Spitfire operational training unit in Llandow, Wales later that year and then to the newly formed No 412 Fighter Squadron, RCAF, which was activated at 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 when the Spitfire airplane he was flying (markings VZ-H) collided with an Oxford Trainer from RAF Cranwell flown by Ernest Aubrey in a cloud at about 400 feet (120 m) AGL (above ground level) at 11:30 over village of Roxholm which lies between RAF Cranwell and RAF Digby, in Lincolnshire, England. 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 instantly. Magee is buried at Holy Cross, Scopwick Cemetery in Lincolnshire, England. [1]. On his grave are enscibed the lines
- "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, 13th December, 1941, the service being conducted by Flight Lieutenant S. K. Belton, the Canadian padre of this Station. He was accorded full Service Honors, 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.'
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[edit] High Flight
Magee's posthumous fame rests mainly on High Flight, a Petrarchan sonnet he wrote on 3rd of September 1941, shortly before his death. He was flying a high-altitude (30,000 feet / 10 000 m) test flight in a newer model of the Spitfire V and 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-Marshall M.H. Le Bas in the officers mess, with whom Magee had trained.
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 at the 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.
'High Flight' has endured as a favorite 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 RCAF and RAF. Songs and symphonic compositions have been based on Magee's text. Many U.S. television viewers were introduced to 'High Flight' when some TV stations ended their programming day with short films based on it. American President Ronald Reagan quoted two brief phrases from the poem in his address to the nation following the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986. The poem also appears as part of a display panel at the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa.
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.
The same words: '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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] References
- 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.
