You wake up and can’t get back to sleep right away. It comes from being a thinking creature. As you lie there, unhappily reviewing the day’s events and the next day’s prospects, an apt first line comes to mind. Not “As I pondered weak and weary,” etc. from Poe. But “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” from you can’t remember who. The line addresses the very problem that arises to haunt you. But what are the next lines?

Finally, sleep comes. In the morning you rush to your Treasury of Great Poems, compiled and edited by Louis Untermeyer. You look up first lines and there it is. Keats is the poet. But it’s not about dying. It’s about “love and fame” sinking to “nothingness” when the poet considers (a) his mortality, (b) his missing out on stars in the sky, and (c) his never again relishing “the faery power of unreflecting love.”

He names three fears. The first is for himself as a writer. Will he “cease to be” before his pen has “gleaned [his] teeming brain” and deposited in “high-piled books [that] hold like rich garners [granaries] the full ripened grain” — what’s been growing in the mind of this man, this writer.

He’s bursting with things to say, and he worries about never giving them form to outlast him and enrich those to come.

He delivers the closer after three “when” scenarios that set us up for it: ” . . . then on the shore/ Of the wide world I stand alone, and think/ till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”

It’s like his “stout Cortez . . . with eagle eyes” for the first time beholding the Pacific Ocean while “all his men [look] at each other with a wild surmise — / Silent, upon a peak in Darien” [Panama].

That was about a translation of Homer. Keats and a friend had read passages to each other on a long autumn night. Next morning at 10 o’clock, the friend, who had slept little, got a message from Keats, who had slept not at all. It was the 14 lines written “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

Gilbert to Wilde to Benny . . . Among “unkillable hymn-tunes” by the composer Sullivan, Gilbert’s partner, is “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Sullivan has a following today, but not Gilbert, with all his “colossal verbal skill and prodigious industry,” per reviewer X.J. Kennedy (New Criterion, January, 1997).

The two didn’t get along, and each longed to do more serious work on his own. But they stayed together, bound by financial needs: Sullivan was supporting a mistress and Gilbert an expensive wife, yacht, and country estate. Neither could make as much money separately.

Gilbert invented the straight face, setting the stage for Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.” And Jack Benny, for that matter. As a dominant writer-director, he set the stage also for the dominating writer-director George Bernard Shaw. He also sued people a lot, having been a barrister.

The book under review was W.S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and His Theatre, by Jane W. Stedman (Oxford).

Gilbert’s widow doted on fresh fruit and had peaches sent her while on holiday from that sumptuous estate. Gilbert had died well, trying to save a screaming teen-age girl. But he’s the one who drowned; she’d been screaming though not in danger.

Another one-eyed monster . . . We can’t digitize whole libraries, so we should be careful about weening kids away from books to the computer screen. There’s far more out there than has ever been keyed or scanned onto the screen, says Francis Morrone in the New Criterion. He speaks as a user, warning against abuse. Digital information is seductive, he says — info from the Internet, compact disc, however it hits the screen, some of it with blinding speed.

I’ll say. I have trouble getting past books on a shelf. I’m an inveterate discoverer of things while looking up other things. Call me Distracted. So when the screen fills up with seemingly endless possibilities (there is an end to it, but no one has found it yet), I am seduced beyond my fondest dreams.

Hypertexts and hyperlinks beckon. Point and click, say the Internet salesmen. Indeed. Point and click and get hooked. Seductive, addictive, enervating, the whole package. It’s a jungle in there. Be careful.

So much and so little time . . . A great poem has “a general sense of compacted wealth,” says Wm. Empson in Seven Kinds of Ambiguity. Lots of meaning packed in there. You needn’t know all of it or have it all in mind at once, no more than you have to know all the notes of a symphony. What you want is awareness of a poem’s “elaborate balance of variously associated feeling.” Just as I was saying the other night at a Forest Park bistro.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. tried meditating in the ’60s, using a mantra, a Sanskrit word which he thinks may mean $85, what he paid for it. Later it dawned on him that “in our civilization” we meditate using “a medieval object, a book,” putting ourselves in touch with people in ages gone by. This kind of meditation, he says, gives “access to brains better than our own.”

Ah the mystery of it all. Some guy 500 years ago had a great thought, and it’s ours to ponder, with or without the Internet.

As for the joys of reading, Dr. Ken Cooper, the meditation-for-relaxation specialist of the ’70s decided at one point that relaxation was as much obtained by quiet reading as by meditation-with-mantra. (But most of all, exercise, he tells in his life story here.)

Secret sharing: People say, “My, you do a lot of reading,” as if I steal from sleep or eating or prayer. It’s time for a little secret: I generally don’t watch the tube, that’s what. The tube I figure is for mind-vacating. A movie works that way too.

The time-snatcher television relates to schooling too. Kids who go for the tube with every free moment, reading only what’s required even in demanding school programs, are culturally deprived. TV, sedative or stimulant, is in any case a drug, sez I.

Some fairly complicated stuff: Harold Bloom touches on TV in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, his unapologetic appreciation and promotion of what the West has given mankind. Discussing “Shakespeare, Center of the Canon,” he says “partisans of Resentment” object that only an elite can read in the way he recommends. Bloom isn’t sure even about that. It’s gotten harder to “read deeply” he concedes, adding that “even the elite tend to lose concentration.”

Wondering if his generation represents the last of the close-reading public, he asks whether his not owning a TV set until age 40 might be relevant. He wonders “if a critical preference for context over text does not reflect” impatience with “deep reading.”

“Context over text” refers to how critical theorists, his “partisans of Resentment,” tear everything apart, eschewing enjoyment in favor of analysis. Bloom also analyzes, but theirs is a peevish pecking away at things to satisfy a craving for upset, he says. Armed with Freud, whom Bloom much respects, and far lesser lights such as the eminence noir Michel Foucault, whom he does not, they take off into a literary sky-blue yonder with anarchistic intent.

When times weren’t a-changing: We take it for granted that times are changing, but Shakespeare didn’t. Nor did his contemporaries, whom we call Elizabethans and Jacobeans, after Queen E. and King James, of Bible fame. Therefore, Shakespeare et al. could talk of human nature as a timeless universal. They were not tempted to political correctness as we know it, incessant politicizing, or analysis of their society, which they took for granted.

Their times were changing, of course, and we can analyze them. But apart from recording the “rise of [merchant] families and their ambition to ally themselves with needy peerages and to acquire country estates,” Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists had no sense of it, T.S. Eliot observes in his Selected Essays, 1913-1922 (London, 1950).

They were “blessed,” said Eliot, because it meant they could “concentrate their attention . . . upon the common characteristics of humanity in all ages, rather than upon the differences.” The same went for Dante and the ancient Greeks but not for writers “in periods of unsettlement,” as Petronius in the 1st century and Lucian in the 2nd.

Elizabethans and Jacobeans “believed in their own age,” as “no nineteenth- or twentieth-century writer of the greatest seriousness has been able to believe in his age,” said Eliot, whose “Waste Land” was no happy-ending Broadway musical. Eliot seemed wistful as he made this point, as if he would like to be able to believe in his age.

The beckoning breach: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” begins Henry V‘s stirring pre-battle exhortation. “Or close the wall up with our English dead!”

Thirty lines later, he concludes,

“The game’s afoot!

Follow your spirit; and upon this charge,”

Cry, ‘God for Harry, England and Saint George!'”

I thrilled to that, though I’d read it long before re-reading it of a Sunday at Einstein Brothers Bagels after mass at St. Vincent’s up the street.

Meantime, I’d associated “the game’s afoot” with Sherlock Holmes, who says it to Dr. Watson when going after the criminal. Another lesson in how Shakespeare created our language.

Another language lesson comes when Exeter, Henry’s ambassador, asks the French king to “overlook” what he gave him, meaning to look it over – just the opposite of what we mean by the word. Four hundred years make a difference.

For the groundlings: Another aspect of Shakespeare’s genius is the pace of things. The scene right after the stirring exhortation mocks it. “On, on, on, on, on, to the breach, to the breach!” says Bardolph, a friend of the late Falstaff, the king’s fellow roisterer in his Prince of Wales days.

Bardolph and Nym and Pistol, two other roisterers, decide the hell with this fame and honor business, leaving the stage to the servant boy who thinks about it aloud, then decides to “leave them, and seek some better service.” Later Bardolph is caught stealing from a church. Pistol tries to get him off, but Bardolph is hanged for discipline’s sake. The servant boy is one of those slaughtered by looting French soldiers while he guarded the baggage.

“We would have all such offenders so cut off,” says Henry of Bardolph. “And we give express charge that in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from the villages . . . for when lenity [leniency] and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.” He intended to rule this land and saw no point in angering its people.

It’s part of the whole awareness of Shakespeare. He was so far from going whole hog imperialist a la Kipling or whole hog skeptic a la James Joyce, that he seemed to keep 19 possibilities in his head at once, touching base here, there, wherever it seemed good, to give us in one fell swoop a panoramic view of the proceedings, and all of course in a few extremely well chosen words.

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As for these (I think) fairly well chosen words, kind reader, fare thee well, and you’re not so bad yourself, of course, else you would be reading something else? Original of all this dates from three decades ago, by the way.