Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,

Beloved from pole to pole!

To Mary Queen the praise be given!

She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,

That slid into my soul.

The well-known lines by Golden Age of Hollywood writer/director Samuel Taylor Coleridge come from his silent film masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (soundtrack by Academy Award winner John Williams Wordsworth, who also did the music for Jaws and Star Wars and that one about the daffodils).

Mary Queen, of course, refers to “America’s sweetheart,” the great Canadian silent film star Mary Pickford (born Gladys Smith, 1892, Toronto). Due to her unprecedented international fame and success as a businesswoman, she was known as “Queen of the Movies.”

I memorized those lines of poetry last century in order to impress a girl in university because I was an idiot who did not know the first thing about impressing girls. Today, they come to mind from time to time because I do not know the first thing about impressing anybody due to the above-mentioned idiot thing.

Anyway, I’m thinking about poetry and sleep because it’s been a tough week, and we’re not getting any. Sleep, I mean. We’re getting plenty of poetry,........

© Times Colonist