English: The original manuscript of the poem 'High Flight', by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. This is a letter he sent home to his parents during World War II. The letter is signed, and dated 3 September 1941 ("3-IX-41"). The original had been kept at the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB by Dayton, Ohio. The source of this image is the digital archive maintained by the US Library of Congress, and since its return from the US Air Force Museum, the artifact was kept in the James Madison Memorial Building in Washington DC (Library of Congress).

Transcription of the poem, following Magee's instructions (as he noted on a different poem) that
“If anyone should want this please see that it is accurately copied, capitalized, and punctuated.”:
__________________________________
                    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."
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There has been contention regarding one particular word in transcribing this original manuscript, and that is in the poem's 11th line: "or even eagle flew". There are those who have argued that the penmanship of the word 'never', in "never lark" from the same line, makes for an exacting match, so they say that the proper translation should be "or ever eagle flew" (emphasis added). This discrepancy was asserted in the 1989 Bartleby's Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (https://www.bartleby.com/73/603.html).

A counter-opinion was expressed by Ray Haas (of highflight.wordpress.com and of the defunct highflightproductions.com), in the comments section on this Library of Congress page: https://blogs.loc.gov/catbird/2013/09/john-gillespie-magees-high-flight/. Haas presents four points as evidence arguing that "even" is the proper transcription.

A key part of this analysis which neither source makes is that Magee's penmanship in writing "never" with the "eve_" similarity that follows it is not the only case where he uses extremely similar pen strokes to represent two different letters. Examples here include the 'G' in God in the last line, along with the 'E' in Earth from the first line. A more frequent example is his 'f' in "face of God", along with several other uses of 'f' as in "eagle flew" or "of" in several cases along with "flung" and "footless", while a nearly exactly similar pen stroke is used when he signs his name beginning with the uppercase 'J' for John, as well as the lowercase 'g' in "grace".

So if Magee can write a 'J', a 'g' and an 'f' with near-exactly similar pen strokes, and likewise for 'E' and 'G', then it is entirely conceivable, if not likely, that he wrote that 'r' in "never" using the same stroke as 'n' in "even".

Perhaps a stronger example which serves to indicate that the proper transcription is "even eagle flew" is found on the opposite side of this page, available here: https://blogs.loc.gov/catbird/?attachment_id=2225?loclr=blogpoe. Near the bottom of his letter to his parents he writes: "... what goes on in an operational squadron." And here, the way he writes his 'n' in "squadron" is a close match to indicate that the poem reads "even eagle flew".

This makes for a strong case that the transcription found at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/High_Flight and elsewhere are in need of being corrected. This shows that the far more common version of "even eagle flew" is the proper wording, conforming to the conclusion of Ray Haas.

Structurally, the poem is a 16-line sonnet, with the rhyme pattern of ABAB-CDCD-EFEGFG, being composed of two quatrains (four lines each) and a sextet (six lines), or alternatively an octave of eight lines followed by a sestet of six. Had it been written in the form of ABAB-CDCD-EFEF-GG, it would have been a classic 16-line Shakespearean Sonnet of three quatrains and one couplet, akin to the Petrarchan pattern.

Techniques that Magee made use of include personification, alliteration, sibilance and enjambment. Wind that is shouting, wings that are laughter-silvered, on a craft that is eager, etc. And his 1941 phrase of "the high untresspassed sanctity of space" preceded the actual first human spaceflight in 1961 by a score. He indicates that his mind entered this realm, which would be physically entered by astronautics pioneers like Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard. John Gillespie Magee, Jr. became an astronaut in his imagination, and a 44 years after his own tragic death, US President Ronald Reagan would recite his poem when honoring the Challenger astronauts.