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John Gillespie Magee |
John Gillespie Magee was the son of a wealthy Pittsburgh family, educated in England and winner of the poetry prize at Rugby School in 1936. He was accepted at Yale but chose instead to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force, getting his wings in June 1941. At nineteen, he was full of enthusiasm, and after the seventh flight in his Spitfire he wrote a poem, showed it to his commander at lunch, and sent it home the same day on the back of a letter to his parents.
A few months later Magee was killed in a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire. His father, curate of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, published the poem in a church letter, and Archibald MacLeish included it in a Library of Congress exhibit called “Faith and Freedom”.
Though rarely anthologized, it has been the heart song of pilots around the world ever since, engraved on many headstones at Arlington, and quoted by President Reagan eulogizing those who died in the explosion of the Shuttle Challenger.
Now we have only his poem. Like Beowulf, shouting as he plunged into the serpent-filled sea, like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, rallying his troops before the Battle of Agincourt, like Walt Whitman and Wilfred Owen going to war before him, Magee gave us a last childish cry of joy on the eve of a long darkness. And through his verse he became immortal.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |