Flight

 I've mentioned before my eldest grandson's love of aviation. This has even led him to poetry – specifically to the sonnet 'High Flight', written in 1941 by John Gillespie Magee, Jr, and inspired by his experience of flying Spitfires for the Royal Canadian Air Force...  

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.

Well, there is certainly poetry in flight. In being flown, however – as an airline passenger on an international flight – there is little but prose at its most prosaic. Such flight has been stripped of all poetry, all romance, all pleasure. Negotiating an airport is surely the most depressing, exhausting, humiliating and thoroughly miserable ordeal anyone ever voluntarily undertakes. And the low point, reliably, is the hellish process of getting through 'Security' – to paraphrase Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 
'For the miseries of the many
 Can be oftimes traced to few, 
 As the hand that plants explosives
 Starts an endless airport queue.'*

Some, however, have found a kind of poetry in flying as a passenger. The great Les Murray brilliantly evokes the experience of arrival in 'Touchdown' – 

The great airliner has been filled
all night with a huge sibilance
which would rhyme with FORTH
but now it banks, lets sunrise
in in freak lemon Kliegs,
eases down like a brushstroke 
into swift cement, and throws out
its hurricane of air anchors.
Soon we'll all be standing
encumbered and forbidding in the aisles
till the heads of those farthest forward
start rocking side to side, leaving,
and that will spread back:
we'll all start swaying along as
people do on planks but not on streets,
our heads tick-tocking with times
that are wrong everywhere. 

And here is Thom Gunn, 'Flying Over California' – 

Spread beneath me it lies—lean upland
sinewed and tawny in the sun, and
valley cool with mustard, or sweet with
loquat. I repeat under my breath
names of places I have not been to:
Crescent City, San Bernardino
—Mediterranean and Northern names.
Such richness can make you drunk. Sometimes
on fogless days by the Pacific,
there is a cold hard light without break
that reveals merely what is—no more
and no less. That limiting candour,
that accuracy of the beaches,
is part of the ultimate richness.

That too is a sonnet of a kind. 


* 'For the pleasures of the many/Can be oftimes traced to one, /As the hand that plants an acorn/Shelters armies from the sun.'