The Sun that went down crimson in the west

Red sky at night – shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning – shepherd’s cottage is on fire. I hand you that saying, for what it’s worth, because it has always made me smile, especially since my grandfather, a gas-fitter by trade, had a part-time job as second officer on my home town fire brigade – until blindness overtook him in middle age.

Red sky at night. Even the words alone conjure up a clear image that usually brings a smile of pleasurable anticipation of a better tomorrow, although not always…

Ensanguining the skies

How heavily it dies

Into the west away;

Past touch and sight and sound

No further to be found

How hopeless under ground

Falls the remorseful day.

Alfred Housman, of course (he who wrote “The Shropshire Lad”). Housman was good at distant colouration; he coined the phrase, “Blue remembered hills.” But in this instance, these lines were quoted by Inspector Morse in the final story of the television series before his death. He was having a drink on the terrace of the Victoria Arms, Marston, with Sergeant Lewis, as they watched the blood-red sunset over the River Cherwell and the Oxford skyline. How often have I had my lunch with the Headington clergy fraternal on that very same terrace! The wistfulness here is because of the sunset as a metaphor for mortality, not merely because it is “ensanguined” – what a long word for red.

Sunsets, particularly those which paint the western sky with flame, are always moving to the human spirit. Consider one of our greatest paintings of the nineteenth century, Turner’s "The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838". The title of the painting is almost longer that the frame in which it is set. The old warrior sailing ship, HMS Temeraire, hero of Waterloo indeed, companion in battle with HMS Victory, is being towed up the Thames estuary to be broken up at a shipyard in Rotherhithe. She suffers the indignity of being hauled to her fate by a steam tug, the very means of the new naval technology which is making her obsolete. The flaming setting of the sun underlines the fact that her era is over – her day is done. But what most people do not notice is that if the Temeraire is being towed up the Thames to Rotherhithe, Turner’s sun is actually setting in the east! It is called artistic licence.

Christina Rossetti, whom most people only remember as being the author of the Christmas carol entitled, “In the bleak mid-winter”, wrote the poem, “Easter Even”, when she had just turned thirty years old. She wrote deeply religious verse all her life and poignant love poetry. She remained unmarried, although she received two proposals of marriage, declining one because of her suitor’s Roman Catholicism (which she deemed incompatible with her Anglican faith) and the other because of her suitor’s agnosticism (although she loved both dearly). She died from cancer at the age of sixty-four. She is buried in Highgate Cemetery, in north London, and if you ever want to watch a really dramatic red sunset, then watch the ensanguined skies over the tombstones and memorial statuary of Highgate Cemetery.

What complex, and yet also predictable, imagery there is in Christina Rossetti’s “Easter Even”. The subtle wordplay makes us think… The Sun that went down crimson in the west… and we wonder to ourselves when we hear it read to us (although it is obvious visually when we read it for ourselves), “Did she mean ‘Sun’ in its Good Friday setting, or ‘Son’, as in God’s own Son, in his Good Friday entombment?” Both are applicable. The red sunset will portend a glorious dawn on the morrow, but the entombed Son of God, bloodstained from the crucifixion, will fulfil the promises that he has received from his heavenly Father… and on the third day, rise again. In either case, he shall rise renewed in strength.

Sacrificing her own power and will to love to her Christian faith (some would say unnecessarily), caused her great anguish, as did the onset of Graves’ disease in 1871, followed by a chronic heart complaint later on. How she herself need to be persuaded by her own lines of Christian faith…

God almighty shall give joy for pain,

Shall comfort him who grieves…

But she was persuaded by her Christian faith. The Easter Gospel was her life’s foundation and hope. When mortality has its final way, we come to the point when human beings can do nothing more… There is nothing more that they can do for all their passionate care… but to wait upon God. But even as the suns sets red into the west, Christina speaks the Christian hope…

God Almighty, He can break the seal,

And roll away the stone…

* * * * *

Very early on the first day of the week they went to the tomb when the sun had risen. And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the door of the tomb?” And looking up, they saw that the stone was rolled back…