Grave: Row 3. Grave 33

A standard Commonwealth Grave Commission (CWGC) inscribed gravestone.

The Isolated burial of Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee who served with the 412th Royal Canadian Air Force Squadron.  Magee was also a poet who wrote the poem "High Flight" which found particular fame when the President of U.S.A., Ronald Reagen, used lines from the poem as part of his address to the American people, after the "Challenger" space-ship blew up, killing seven of the crew.

Soon after it was written, Archibald MacLeish, who served as Librarian of Congress from 1939 to 1944, identified the sonnet as the first great poem to come out of World War II, a view shared by the poet Joseph Auslander, then a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. The poem was displayed in early 1942 in an exhibition of poetry at the Library entitled 'Faith and Freedom'. The manuscript copy of High Flight remains at the Library of Congress and High Flight has since appeared in many anthologies and books of quotations. At the end of the war, actor Tyrone Power, who had served as a U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot, recited the poem from memory at a Hollywood gathering, in a moving tribute to all those who had given their lives. It was apparently on this occasion that fellow actor Ronald Reagan first heard the words of High Flight.

The poem reads:

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, nor 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.

Source:  

CWGC

https://www.bombercommandmuseumarchives.ca/s,johnmagee.html

PILOT OFFICER
J. G. MAGEE
PILOT
ROYAL CANADIAN AIR FORCE
11TH DECEMBER 1941 AGE 19

"OH I HAVE SLIPPED THE SURLY BONDS OF EARTH...

 PUT OUT MY HAND AND TOUCHED THE FACE OF GOD"