Blues in the night . . . Sullivan's partner . . . Beware the internet, the man said . . . Empson's Ambiguity . . . Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s mantra, Dr. Cooper's sage advice . . .

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.)