Ophelia’s sun
is a Sahara dust orange
of October sky

Social and other media feeds were wonderfully rife yesterday with pictures of and speculations about the orange dot of a sun in the UK sky, framed so by Saharan dust brought up with the whip of Hurricane Ophelia’s waning but still powerful winds.

I quoted lines from Coleridge’s Hymn before Sunrise…, and the picture above taken at Ottery St Mary, on the Coleridge Memorial Trust Facebook page,

Thou first and chief, sole sovereign of the Vale!
O struggling with the darkness all the night,
And visited all night by troops of stars,
Or when they climb the sky or when they sink:
Companion of the morning-star at dawn,
Thyself Earth’s rosy star, and of the dawn
Co-herald: wake, O wake, and utter praise!

but this morning I also quoted there the following, with an acknowledgement to Malcolm Guite, author of Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, these apter lines he tweeted from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,

All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon