Ronald Reagan: Poet and Poetry — a Retrospective, Tribute and Memorial — by Michael R. Burch

“High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. was a favorite poem of Reagan’s, according to Peggy Noonan, one of his speechwriters:

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.

Interestingly Magee was also a teenage poet when he wrote “High Flight.” Magee died in his Spitfire on December 11, 1941 at the age of 19, just a few weeks after penning the poem. He was born in Shanghai, China in 1922, the son of missionary parents; his father was Scotch-Irish-American, his mother English. He earned a scholarship to Yale in 1939, but in September 1940 he dropped out of college and into the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was sent to England for combat duty in July 1941, where he flew sorties in defense of England and fighter sweeps over France, rising to the rank of pilot officer. “High Flight” was written on the back of a letter to his parents which stated, “I am enclosing a verse I wrote the other day. It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed.” After Magee’s death, the sonnet came to the attention of the Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish, who included it in an exhibition of poems called “Faith and Freedom” in February 1942. The poem subsequently was widely copied and distributed. MacLeish acclaimed Magee as the first poet of the war. “High Flight” came to be knows as “the pilot’s creed.” The first and last lines of the poem constitute the epitaph on Magee’s gravestone:

Oh! I have slipped
The surly bonds of earth
Put out my hand
And touched the face of God.

Reagan was present the night fellow actor Tyrone Power recited “High Flight” from memory at a party after his return from fighting in World War II. Later, the poem was read over Power’s grave by Laurence Olivier. The day of the Challenger space shuttle disaster, in 1986 Reagan concluded a message addressed to the nation with: We shall never forget them nor the last time we saw them, as they prepared for their mission and waved good-bye and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God.