Are You Open to Old Ideas?A randomly gathered consideration of the tried and true . . .

Blues in the night . . .

You wake up and can't get back to sleep right away. It comes partly 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 whom. 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. John Keats is the poet. It's about "love and fame" sinking to "nothingness" when the poet considers his mortality -- dying and never again beholding the star-spangled night sky, never again relishing "the faery power of unreflecting love.”

He fears 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, in another Keats poem, 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].

Those lines were about a translation of Homer of which 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 that night "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer."