SPECIFICS FOR INSOMNIA.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19258, 20 December 1930, Page 17 (Supplement)

SPECIFICS FOR INSOMNIA.

Milton One Of The Best Literary Soporifics.

gOMETIMES I hear friends complain that they suffer from insomnia. . The answer is judicious reading. . . Observe the word judicious. Just any old kind of reading won’t do, says an American writer, Halifax Jones. Poetry is the best. But not narrative poetry. A story in verse—like “Don Juan”, for example—is apt to excite instead of soothing you. Unless you have read it recently enough to have the story fresh in mind, you are led on from stanza to stanza; you want to see what is going to happen next. Philosophic or religious poetry is the ideal soporific. If it happens to be something you are particularly fond of, however, no matter what class it falls in, it will not serve. Fitzgerald is not good for me when I want tp resume my slumber, nor Gray, nor Byron, nor certain poems of Tennyson’s. I find Wordsworth an excellent anodyne. He is exalted and profound—and therefore not agreeable to me. But Milton is the prince of pacifiers. I seem to remember that in my school days I read “Lycidas” and “II Penseroso” all the way through several times. In the last few years I have frequently

read the first fifty or sixty lines of each of them, but have never gone any further. Now and then I go far enough along to hear the far-off curfew sound over some wide-watered shore, but usually the book slips from my hand and I close my eye* blissfully by the time that Cynthia checks her dragon yoke gently o’er the accustomed oak. And “Paradise Lost”, opened at any page, puts me to sleep even more quickly. I sometimes think that the surgeons ought to try Milton's poetry in place of ether in the operating room. It acts almost immediately, and its after-effects are almost nil. In the field of prose, the finest foe of insomnia that I can recommend i* Bradley’s “Appearance and Reality”. I have never been able to understand ten consecutive words of it, and anything you can’t understand—provided that you don’t make a struggle for comprehension—induces a prompt and delicious languor. I recommend, too, Gibbons’s “Decline and Fall”, the prefaces °f Sir Walter Scott, and the “Book of Leviticus”. My advice is not to try Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Swift, Thackeray or Thomas Hardy.