Poetry

[flofrog]

All right this is a long path to a poem here, but if you have some time and patience it's worth it, I think...

I have many interests and for some  weird reason, one is people who show interest in human laws. One of these persons is Preet Bharara, born in India and came to live in United States. I love him for his humanity. He has a podcast and a newsletter, this below is this day's newsletter, titled as usual A Note from Preet.  So in it is a poem...

Dear Reader,

This week’s note is not about politics, the law, or some current event. It’s about a historical footnote that moved me this past week. Maybe you know the background story. I certainly didn’t. So I thought I’d share it.

I happened upon it last Friday evening, just before dinner. I was reminded by someone that it was January 28th and that this was the anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. On that date in 1986, on live television, the Challenger exploded in mid-air on its ascent. The blast killed all seven crew members, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. I was a senior in high school, but I wasn’t in class for some reason. Maybe I was sick; maybe I was playing hooky; I don’t remember. I watched the launch at home in my bedroom, on my black and white RCA television set. Like everyone else, I was beyond shocked. Maybe I shrieked; maybe I cried; I don’t remember. The feeling of loss was very heavy in the country.

As it happens, President Ronald Reagan was supposed to report on the State of the Union that night. But the state of the union was sad and pained and grief-stricken. It was not the time for politics. So instead Reagan delivered a short address to console the country, and it was near-perfect for the moment. He spoke to the families of the crew who were mourning; he spoke to the schoolchildren of America who witnessed a schoolteacher die; and he spoke to all citizens who wondered what the future of space exploration might be.

Reagan said, “The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.” He said, “We’ll continue our quest in space. . . Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue.” But it is the final line of his address that is best remembered:

We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’

I remember that line as well as I remember the explosion. My main extracurricular activity in high school was speech. I was a student of it and a practitioner of it, and that perfect line stayed with me. It stayed with a lot of people. I may have wondered if the words were Reagan’s or speechwriter Peggy Noonan’s, but it sounded to many like a literary reference. But there was no Google back then, and I didn’t bother to find out.

Fast forward to last Friday. I had a little time, and so I searched the web for the origin of the “surly bonds of earth.” I learned the story. And if you don’t know it, it’s really something.

The final twelve words of Reagan’s Challenger speech are indeed borrowed from a sonnet. But not by Shakespeare or any other famous poet. The phrases come from a poem called “High Flight.” It was written in 1941 by a man named John Gillespie Magee. Magee was all of 19 years old when he put those words to paper. Born of an American father and an English mother who were missionaries in China, Magee came to the United States in 1939. He won a scholarship to Yale, but in 1940 he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force to become a pilot. He was deployed to England for combat duty in July of 1941. It was while serving in World War II, even before the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, that Magee wrote “High Flight.”

It is a beautiful poem. It is not about death. At least not overtly. Rather, it is about the rush of human flight, which in 1941 was a fairly recent venture. It was, after all, only 38 years after Kitty Hawk. Magee writes of “sun-split clouds” and “footless halls of air.” Magee loved the skies. He loved the skies as future astronauts would. He loved the skies as sailors love the sea.

This is the full 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, 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.
Magee sent the poem to his parents. He would never know the impact it would have, because it was never published in his lifetime. You see, tragedy would strike Magee as it later struck the shuttle crew. A few months after he wrote the sonnet, on December 11, 1941, still only 19, he collided with another plane mid-air over England. History does indeed rhyme, just like a sonnet.

Perhaps he knew he was going to die. Or he knew the risk of it. Perhaps his poem was not just about flight.

I learned something else. Decades after Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee himself slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God, the poem he penned still resonates. It still rates. And it has found life as an inspiration to pilots and astronauts all over the world.

It is inscribed in full on the Space Shuttle Challenger Memorial.

It is the official poem of the Royal Canadian Air Force.

It was taken into space by astronaut Michael Collins on his Gemini 10 mission.

It appears on many headstones in the Arlington National Cemetery.

And it has been set to music by, among other artists, John Denver, who recorded the song “Flight (The Higher We Fly)” in 1983.

I may have been late to it, but I’m glad I finally came to learn the story of the poem and the pilot.
Preet