High Flight

“Sonnet to Rupert Brooke” by John Gillespie Magee Jr. (1938)

This is a sonnet Magee wrote to honor the poet Rupert Brooke, who attended the Rugby School in the early 1900s. Brooke, a World War I poet and soldier, died at 27 of septicemia. His poetry inspired Magee’s own interest in the sonnet form. In this poem, written when Magee was 16, he imagines Brooke’s burial, remarking on the “sublime” (Line 4) nature of its site in Greece “where the leaves were green” (Line 2). As in “High Flight,” Magee’s speaker assesses the quality of sunlight and its “fading deeps” (Line 5) and how “daylight, as a dust, slips through the trees / And drifting, gilds the fern around [Brooke’s] grave” (Lines 9-10). Magee also employs elements of praise here as he suggests Brooke urged “new sight to blinded eyes” (Line 13) regarding the difficulties of war.

“Prospect” by John Gillespie Magee Jr. (1941)

In Chapter 7 of Roger Cole’s High Flight: The Life and Poetry of Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee (2013), he reprints Magee’s early poem “Prospect.” This is a love poem written in 1941 for Elinor Lyon, the headmaster of Rugby School’s daughter.