By the time of WW-II, a body of airplane poetry had arisen. Of course we all know the one titled, High Flight -- “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.” That was written by Canadian pilot John Gillespie Magee in 1941, when he was only 19. He died in England three months later. His Spitfire collided with another plane.
The pure kinetic joy that Magee took from flying had not yet been jaded. He did not live to be herded, as we have all been herded, into a large aluminum tunnel in one city, only to leave it in another. He had never flown, as we do routinely, without looking over the outside of the airplane that carries us -- without seriously gazing out the windows at the earth below us.
That same year, 1941, poet Selden Rodman gave us an anthology of the Poetry of Flight. He quotes airplane poems up to the war -- poems before Magee’s High Flight. He traces poetry all the way from Ovid on Icarus, to Anne Morrow Lindbergh on flying across Alaska. He quotes Milton on birds; Leonardo on the dream of flying. And, during the early 20th century, the airplane itself became the subject of some fine poetry.
This was a time when flying was fun. Take, for example, W. H. Auden's playful poem, the Airman's Alphabet. Some samples:
F is for Flying
Habit of hawks
and unholy hunting
and ghostly journey
P for Propeller
Wooden wind-oar
and twisted whirler
and lifter of load
Since skywriting was a great wonder of my own childhood I read William Rose Benét's poem on Sky Writers with glee. He says,
The mouths gaped; the eyes bulged; head after head
Twisted skyward; the lips moved and read ...
And I saw the mountains fallen, the world's foundations fled,
And the sky rolled up like a scroll for a judgement on the dead
Rilke’s poem, A Sonnet to Orpheus is accurate and bittersweet. The invention of flight, says Rilke, is presently incomplete. “O not till the time when flight/no longer will mount for its own sake,” he writes, “Not till a pure Whither/outweighs boyish pride.” Since then, you and I have reached that time. No boyish pride, no love of flight for its own sake remains as we file into our jet-powered aluminum tube. Saint Exupéry saw that coming in a lovely essay, The Tool. ”Every machine,” he says, “will gradually take on this patina and lose its identity in its function.”
In 1941, however, war was upon us. Whatever we’d seen of the dark side of the airplane’s function was about to be multiplied. Auden was probably thinking less of war than of the raw danger of early flight when he came to the letter Y. For airplanes had been claiming lives of the young in peace just as surely they had been in war:
Y is for Youth
Daydream of devils
and dear to the damned
and always to us.
Still, the memory of WW-I was woven about Auden’s lines. And a new war was again laying claim to the airplane in 1941. We could now taste the terrible tension between the specter of war and the glorious freedom of flight. Muriel Rukeyser evokes Icarus when she writes about a pilot in her poem The Structure of the Plane,
Centuries fall behind his brain, the motor
pushes in a four-beat rhythm, his blood moves,
he dares look at the levels mounting in clouds
the dropping fields of the sky the diminishment of earth;
Yet, earlier in that same poem, she’d written about,
the stiff bland soldiers predestined to their death
the bombs piled neatly like children's marbles piled
sperm to breed corpses eugenically by youth
out of seductive death.
And Sydney Alexander captured that same tension between slaughter and the hedonistic innocence of youth in his poem, The Plane:
we who breathe in the intervals of bombs ...
what rising gusts of our youth shall send us spinning
in flickers of sun-spokes there in the highest reaches
airwashed and clean as songs of birds unpinioned!
A later anthology, published after WW-II, titled The Terrible Rain, shows us where the poetry of the sky veered when it fell into the hands of wartime pilots. Before he died in aerial combat, RAF pilot T. R. Hogson wrote,
Dayfall
swallowsong,
murmurous river,
which is memory --
it is death we now look upon.
Throughout the war poems, we find that the beauty of our world, as revealed from the air, stands in haunting contradiction to the horror of aerial warfare. Herbert Corby armed bombers for the RAF. As he writes about flight, the war is reduced to a necessary footnote underlying the flier’s heightened perception of Earth’s beauty below:
The wild roses star the banks of green
and poignant poppies startle their fields with red,
while peace like sunlight rests on the summer scene,
though lilac that flashed in hedges is dulled and dead:
in the faint sky the singing birds go over,
the sheep are quiet where the quiet grasses are.
I go to the plane among the peaceful clover,
but climbing in the Hampden, shut myself in war.
The airplane is, indeed a strange machine. It is the locus where four strong forces converge -- lift, drag, gravity, and thrust. Yet it offers a place apart, an oasis of calm, and a glorious kind of loge box from which to watch the theatre of earth and sky unfolding before us.
War is an unfortunate appendage to the airplane’s story. It cannot be ignored, yet it is only an appendage. So we turn next to the Zen of flight that touches all these poets. Let us turn to flight as it settled the souls of so many early fliers. It is time for us to meet Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
Sources:
S. Rodman, The Poetry of Flight. (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941).
The Terrible Rain: The War Poems 1939-1945. Brian Gardner, ed. (London: Magnum Books, 1966).