None of us have minds as good as Newton's and few of us during this horror will have quarantines as fortunate as his. He was able to shelter from the Great Plague of London (1664-1666), enjoying social distancing from London and Londoners at his family's farm in bucolic Lincolnshire with abundant time alone to read, to study and, enjoying the meditative company of cows, to think.

Then, too, none of us will be able to emulate Will Shakespeare who nimbly adapted to plague's closure of London's theatres (making the writing and staging of plays redundant) by turning to poetry instead. Working from home in 1592 he produced his sexy narrative poem Venus and Adonis which, published as a kind of paperback, sold like hot cakes (or, to use a better 2020 analogy, sold like rolls of toilet paper).

We're not all Newtons and Shakespeares and yet for those of us blessed with glass-half-full dispositions these times of forced quarantine and distancing do seem a kind of opportunity. It will be a shame not to DO something with this splendid raw material, this superabundance of spare time, not to be able to answer with pride when one day a child quizzes "What did you do with your Quarantine, grandad?"

Back to this theme in a moment but first to the happy way in which one outcome of today's horror is that thinking people everywhere are remembering and dusting off and posting great creative works of yesteryear that with the COVID-19 pestilence upon us suddenly take on a new lustre, oomph and relevance.

One of the best and brightest of these is satirist/composer-songwriter/piano virtuoso and dead-set genius Tom Lehrer's 1960 performance of his song I Got It From Agnes. To put a smile on your dial which will last all day, Google the ditty.

Elsewhere cultured commentators are revisiting towering plague and pestilence poems such as Thomas Nashe's chillingly majestic Litany In Time of Plague (circa 1600) in which the plague is "Hell's executioner" democratically, dispassionately executing everyone irrespective of rank and station and waking us up to what really matters and doesn't matter.

"Fond are life's lustful joys;/Death proves them all but toys," Nashe reminds us.

Suddenly too there's re-appreciation of Daniel Defoe's classic novel Robinson Crusoe with the eponymous castaway's mental and physical plight (his long, long isolation alone on a desert island) thought to be an insightful discussion of exactly what's befalling those forced into isolation by COVID-19.

But back to the gift of quarantine and to what to do with it.

An avid reader, always conscious of how much there is to read and of how little time one has to read it, I plan to make my Quarantine a time when I tackle my literary bucket list in deadly earnest. The modern miracle of the e-book device means that one can buy books from home without making perilous excursions to book shops. Of course the notion of a bucket list is given added piquancy, especially for wizened seniors like this columnist, now that death's deep, dark bucket looms so large.

So for example, hitherto criminally ignorant of the poetry of Emily Dickinson (even though she is the most famous, most-read American poet of them all) I am going to spend my quarantine reading as much of her as I can.

And singing her too, for a renowned Dickinson scholar points out that every single one of her profound poems can be sung to the banal (but catchy) popular tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas.

And so by the end of this quarantine I expect to be able to go on Tom Gleeson's ABC TV Hard Quiz and to win at a canter with either Emily's poetry or Robinson Crusoe (for I have just tucked it in to my e-book to read it again, thrilled, for the first time since 65 years ago when I was an urchin) as my Special Subject.

And, suddenly immersed in Emily's poems I've paid special attention to our prime minister's declaration that because of COVID-19 he has been doing even more praying than usual. "My prayer knees have been getting a good work out," he's testified.

Emily has a great deal to say, sceptically, about prayer. Not that in these terrible times anyone, let alone smarty pants atheists like me, can blame anyone for resorting to prayer. But now (thank you, quarantine!) that I have the time to study Emily I find I share her experience of trying prayer but of never being convinced there is a God listening. Right now, rather than asking a god to intervene we must find a vaccine, and astute Emily (1830-1886) almost seems to be anticipating credulous Scomo and these viral times when she muses:

"Faith" is a fine invention

For Gentlemen who see!

But Microscopes are prudent

In an Emergency!