A red sky at night is a delight for shepherds, writers and artists alike
A glowing red sky, shot with crimson and copper and streaked with the dusky blush of sunset, is a spectacle that has spellbound writers and artists since the dawn of time
As I look out of the window one evening across our forested patch of the High Weald, the sky looks almost edible: a whirl of peach streaked with raspberry sauce. The old adage whispers through my thoughts: ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning.’
Since time began, we have been spellbound by the visual spectacle of the heavens glowing a fiery red and we have attached our own meanings to it. According to the proverb dating back to the Gospel of Matthew, for shepherds (or sailors) it heralded a ‘delight’ or carried a ‘warning’, depending on the time of day. In the UK, where weather systems come mainly from the west, it makes sense that a rosy evening sky signals that pleasant weather is on its way. Conversely, waking up to a red sky in the east suggests that the clement weather may have passed and something wetter and windier could soon take its place.
'There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood'
The saying was certainly known to Shakespeare, who uses a red sky in the morning to prefigure disaster. In the narrative poem Venus and Adonis, he evokes ‘the ruby-colour’d portal’ that ‘like a red morn’ brings ‘wrack to the seaman, tempest to the field/Sorrow to shepherds, woe unto the birds,/Gusts and foul flaws to herdmen and to herds’. He returns to the imagery in Henry IV, Part I, weaving a pathetic fallacy that anticipates the violence of the upcoming rebellion. ‘How bloodily the sun begins to peer/Above yon busky hill!’ cries King Henry, as he observes the red blush to the morning sky.
It’s in autumn and winter, when the sun lounges closer to the horizon, that our skies are most apt to turn red, as the light journeying towards us must take a longer route. According to the phenomenon of ‘Rayleigh Scattering’, named after the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Lord Rayleigh, by the time the rays reach us, the blue light has been scattered away from our line of sight and reds and oranges dominate our vision.
A fiery sunrise over a valley in the Yorkshire Dales.
Some red skies are manmade. The war years, in particular, lent a terrifying new significance to a red-lit sky, with residents emerging from bomb shelters during the 1940 Blitz to see their cities ablaze and the firmament glowing an eerie red. ‘They are firing, we are falling, and the red skies rend and shiver us,’ cried the apologist writer G. K. Chesterton in The Ballad of St Barbara, penned shortly after the First World War and evoking the violence of the Battle of Marne.
In his science-fiction novel The World Set Free, published in 1914, H. G. Wells would anticipate the horrors of the Second World War’s final chapter, describing skies with a ‘full-bodied crimson glare’ caused by ‘the unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs’.
For writers conveying a dramatic climax, these florid skies have proved irresistible. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, it’s under an oppressive ‘hot and copper sky’ that Coleridge’s sailor realises the ‘hellish thing’ that he has done in slaying the albatross, triggering a curse upon the crew. A century on, the violent conclusion of Joseph Conrad’s pioneering psychological novel Lord Jim (1900) is heightened by a description of a sky that is ‘blood-red, immense, [and] streaming like an open vein’. In 1938, Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic novel Rebecca evokes a glowing red sky, as Manderley (the ancestral estate where the story is set) burns in the distance, signifying the indelible mark the first Mrs de Winter’s murder has left on her successor. ‘The road to Manderley lay ahead,’ reads the novel’s closing passage. ‘There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood.’
'However we seek to explain a red sky, its effect is unavoidably visceral'
Painters, too, have taken inspiration from scarlet skies to communicate an array of emotions. For Monet, it meant hope: a new dawn for France; whereas, for the deeply devout John Linnell, a bucolic idealist, it represented spiritual fulfilment and the divine. Millet was less romantic: his red sky marked the end of a hard day working the land. For some artists, a crimson sky denoted violence and rage. In The Slave Ship, the dramatic red sky chosen by Turner suggests the horror and bloodshed of bondage. For visionaries such as John Martin and William Blake, it signified apocalypse; whereas for the troubled Edvard Munch it meant terror and existential crisis. ‘Suddenly the sky turned blood red,’ he recalled. ‘I felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature.’
Red skies can be amplified by extreme, and often catastrophic, natural events. When the atmosphere is polluted with large quantities of tiny particles caused by wildfire smoke, volcanic ash or dust swept high in the sky from a distant desert, the particles filter out the shorter blue wavelengths of light (a phenomenon known as Mie scattering), painting the skies red instead. A startling example of this was the August 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia, one of the most dramatic volcanic explosions in history. As the volcanic haze slowly drifted across the planet, it coloured evening skies thousands of miles away in the most extraordinary shades of red. It was a sight that Alfred, Lord Tennyson would later draw on in his 1892 poem St Telemachus, describing ‘the fierce ashes of some fiery peak… hurl’d so high they ranged about the globe’.
Turner's 'The Slave Ship' uses the dark red sky to emphasise the bloodshed and horror of bondage
At the time of the eruption, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was working as a Classics teacher and curate in rural Lancashire. Mesmerised by the vivid, otherworldly skies, which reached England in late October, he made detailed observations of them, noting that the display was ‘more like inflamed flesh than the lucid reds of ordinary sunsets’ and would fade to ‘a faint dusky blush’. ‘It has prolonged the daylight, and optically changed the season,’ he remarked.
Meanwhile, gazing at the phenomenon from the banks of the Thames in London’s Chelsea was the artist William Ascroft, his pastels working at pace on paper as he recorded the rapidly changing skyscapes for the Royal Society. He produced more than 500 sketches to document the splendid sight, giving them evocative names such as Opalescent sunset and Afterglow with a flush of salmon.
Before such marvels could be explained by science, elaborate myths were attached to unusually red skies. According to Viking legend, Sköll, a colossal wolf, dictated day and night by chasing the sun across the heavens. One version of the folklore states that when the wolf closes in on the exhausted sun, the blood oozing from its jaws paints the sky a gory red.
Further south, the Romans looked to the celestial sphere to gauge the mood of the Gods, reading a red-stained sky as an omen of doom. The great poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses feeds on this mythology, with unusual red markings in a night sky prefiguring the assassination of Julius Caesar. ‘Fire-brands were seen, burning in the midst of the stars,’ he writes. ‘Often drops of blood rained from the clouds… and the moon’s chariot was spattered with blood.’
However we seek to explain a red sky, its effect is unavoidably visceral, acquainting Romantics such as Percy Bysshe Shelley with the wondrous and inexplicable ‘sublime’. In his lyrical poem The Cloud, told from the perspective of its namesake, we’re lifted high into the air. We float among ‘the sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes/And his burning plumes outspread’, and are enveloped by its counterpart, sunset: ‘The crimson pall of eve’ that falls ‘from the depth of Heaven above.’
However, from down here on the ground, in my corner of Sussex close to where Shelley was born, I’m gazing at something softer and more delectable. The poet’s cloud is a giant puff of cream, perhaps, in my peach-melba sky.
This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe
