I began reading a new book today, one that I found in a used bookstore over the Christmas holidays. It's called The Shadow of the Sun, and it's a 1991 reprint of A. S. Byatt's first novel, originally published in 1964. I have a slightly superstitious feeling about both of these dates because I was born in 1964 and married in 1991. I also have a perpetually fraying, queasy, affectionate, disappointed, overwhelmed, delighted, questing, and jealous relationship with Byatt's work; and since I had never even heard of this debut novel before I found it wedged in a stack of used paperbacks, I bought it instantly.

The reprint includes an introduction in which Byatt revisits her young self, "a very desperate faculty wife in Durham," 25 years old, with two small children, "surrounded by young men who debated in an all-male Union from which the women students were excluded, though there was nowhere else for them to meet." Nonetheless, "I had a cleaning-lady, and ran across the Palace Green to the University Library for the hour she was there to write, fiercely, with a new desperation. The children were human and beautiful and I loved them."

This is exactly the sort of description that makes me crazy: first, because of course I recognize that desperation, the suffocating embrace of very small children, the way in which they suck away a woman's private life, how in those years nothing, nothing, seems more precious that a single hour alone. Nonetheless, "I had a cleaning-lady," she tells me, without comment or explanation. "Oh, how nice for you," I imagine myself replying, my voice sodden with ironically understated cattiness. You can see that we don't always bring out the best in each other. On the other hand, she is constantly making my brain work, making me look again at the books I love or the poems I have forgotten . . . such as this one. How could I have forgotten it? Today it feels like the most glorious poem I have ever read.

A Farewell to False Love 

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) 

Farewell, false love, the oracle of lies,
A mortal foe and enemy to rest,
An envious boy, from whom all cares arise,
A bastard vile, a beast with rage possessed,
A way of error, a temple full of treason,
In all effects contrary unto reason. 

A poisoned serpent covered all with flowers,
Mother of sighs, and murderer of repose,
A sea of sorrows whence are drawn such showers
As moisture lend to every grief that grows;
A school of guile, a net of deep deceit,
A gilded hook that holds a poisoned bait. 

A fortress foiled, which reason did defend,
A siren song, a fever of the mind,
A maze wherein affection finds no end,
A raging cloud that runs before the wind,
A substance like the shadow of the sun,
A goal of grief for which the wisest run. 

A quenchless fire, a nurse of trembling fear,
A path that leads to peril and mishap,
A true retreat of sorrow and despair,
An idle boy that sleeps in pleasure's lap,
A deep mistrust of that which certain seems,
A hope of that which reason doubtful deems. 

Sith then thy trains my younger years betrayed,
And for my faith ingratitude I find;
And sith repentance hath my wrongs bewrayed,
Whose course was ever contrary to kind:
False love, desire, and beauty frail, adieu!
Dead is the root whence all these fancies grew.