High Flight

Thanks to Radio 3's Words and Music – a wonderful programme that does exactly what its title suggests – I discovered this beautiful poem by John Gillespie Magee, Jr – High Flight.

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.

You can hear it here, read by Will Howard as part of a Words and Music episode exploring mankind's yearning to fly. Magee, an American pilot and poet, was killed at the age of 19, in 1941.

Thought for the day

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition. WH Auden

Hic

A funny little conversation took place in my French class yesterday. It all started with the word 'hic', used in French to mean a 'snag', in the same way that we use 'hiccup' (or 'hiccough', though not sure my teacher was convinced by the spelling from the pronunciation). But it's not short for 'hiccup', that's an English word, after all. Instead it apparently comes from the Latin, hic, meaning 'here'. Which seems a bit strange as in the sentence 'Voilà le hic', that's the job of 'Voilà'. Anyway. *Gallic shrug*(If you know otherwise about its etymology, let me know.) So, the French word for 'hiccough' is 'hoquet', or perhaps that should be the other way round, as I think we took the word from them. Still, that in turn has another, musical meaning – hoquet or hocket is when a melody alternates between two voices in, I suppose, a kind of hiccupy way. But surely 'hoquet' doesn't come from the Latin 'hic', but from the onomatopoeic sound of a hiccup. How strange then that both hic and hiccup have come to mean the same thing. Or is that too much of a coincidence and a muddle?