Читать книгу Sunward I've Climbed - Hermann Hagedorn - Страница 4

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At thirty thousand feet, the mounting exhilaration of his spirit blew off in singing words:

“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings....”

Like a great hawk he wheeled and dipped and soared, swung in vast arcs, drew majestic circumferences around his personal empyrean. His heart was singing, and his mind, too. A sonnet was being born. First, the octave that should paint the picture, the picture of himself, John Magee, chasing “the shouting wind along”, flinging his “eager craft through footless halls of air”. Then the sextet, soaring in joyous freedom,

“Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue”,

straight to the crystalline summation.

The rhymes dropped into place. No groping of the pinched imagination for sounds that matched and made a pattern. The jubilant mind, soaring high, reached deep into the resources of the unconscious. The flier grounded the plane and, as he strode off to his quarters, the final, fourteenth line came, firing the whole with meaning.

Not a line yet on paper, but fourteen glowing lines in his head. He wrote the poem on the back of a letter to his father and mother in America: “I thought it might interest you.”

A boy’s sonnet, to be published somewhere, sometime, perhaps, and read by a handful who like such things. A boy’s expression of exhilaration, bursting at the end into flame. A boy’s votive candle on the high altar. Exultant, beautiful words, but words only. Winsome, as all youth is winsome, when it forgets itself and reaches clean, bright hands to the God it hopes but is not sure exists. But what is fragile loveliness in the midst of an epochal struggle for mastery? A bird’s feather floating down in No Man’s Land, a birdsong in the intervals of the cannonade.

Over the training-field the planes soar, dip and tumble. A plane roars out of a cloud. Two planes, two gallant youths, crash....

Yes, he has “slipped the surly bonds of earth”.

And the sonnet?

The sparkling words have suddenly become something else. They are not words at all any more. They are a life, a gallant, gifted, laughing life, offered for freedom. And they are more. They are youth everywhere, slipping the “surly bonds” of egocentric living, soaring up from a world where money, pleasure, a career, living one’s own life, are important, into a broader, cleaner atmosphere of self-surrender and self-giving, and a freedom beyond any earthly freedom, with eternity no farther away than the outstretched hand.

The inspired words are all this. And they are yet more. They are hearts throughout the world, hungering, too, to slip “the surly bonds of earth”, climb sunward,

“Where never lark, or even eagle flew”,

and, amid ruin and impending ruin, put out a hand and touch the face of God.