I saw some lines in a magazine this week that were from the very first poem I remembered from WWII.
"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings."They were from "High Flight", written by a 19 year old volunteer named John Magee of the Royal Canadian Air Force who was killed in 1941.
I remember this because I had a cousin in the RCAF who was also killed in 1941 (and a maternal grandfather killed on the Western Front in the Great War.) We don't seem to have anything today that a school child can memorize or can be recited by Katie Couric. Where are the bittersweet but beautiful lines from Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" (1917)..Not in the hands of boys But in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of good bys" No Rupert Brooke (1915) "That I should die; think this of me, that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England". In 1939 Yeats wrote "An Irish Airman Forsees his Death" and in that same year Auden wrote his mordant "September 1, 1939". Robinson Jeffers in 1941 wrote, "Locked lips of boys too proud to scream". But what do we have today? Afghanastan was done by Kipling. And so we come to the Age of McChrystal, the 4 Star Grunt, up at 4 am jogging around his compound like some exercise video, when he should be reading Marcus Aureleus. Or better yet, George Orwell's tribute to a young soldier fighting for Republican Spain in 1936:
"But the thing I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit."
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