'My sun one early morn did shine'

Whether a fiery blaze or a gentle blush, sunrise brings life, hope and a time to be at one with Nature. Six early risers tell Ben Lerwill what dawn means to them

- Ben Lerwill

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.