DAWN will arrive tomorrow, stealing the dark, dissolving the night, setting the morning in motion. Some sunrises ride in on a blaze of fire. Others loom softly out of the gloom, teasing shapes into the contours of the land. Others are soggy or snowclad. But, from Teignmouth to Timbuktu, all dawns bring life and fresh light and a sense of renewal.
This is why, for so many of us, daybreak takes on so much meaning. ‘There was never a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope,’ wrote the late moral philosopher Sir Bernard Williams. Samuel Taylor Coleridge praised ‘the golden exhalations of the dawn’, A. E. Housman believed ‘the hope of man… flowers among the morning dews’ and Virginia Woolf felt that ‘the words we seek hang close to the tree—we come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf’. This uplifting symbolism is near-universal. A brand new morning is a time of promise and optimism.
It’s also a moment each of us experience on our own terms, on a dog walk, through a kettle-fogged kitchen window or with a bleary-eyed stumble to the bus stop. Early risers, joggers, wildlife-watchers, commuters, clubbers, holidaymakers, new parents and night-shift workers: we all have our own relationship with the dawning of the day and, although sunrise might have a habit of coming too soon for the sleep-deprived, there’s no doubt it heralds something profound.
Esta historia es de la edición August 02, 2023 de Country Life UK.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición August 02, 2023 de Country Life UK.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
