Life and art, Aldous Huxley

LIFE AND ART

YOU have sweet flowers for your pleasure;

  You laugh with the bountiful earth

In its richness of summer treasure:

  Where now are your flowers and your mirth?

Petals and cadenced laughter,

  Each in a dying fall,

Droop out of life; and after

  Is nothing; they were all.

But we from the death of roses

  That three suns perfume and gild

With a kiss, till the fourth discloses

  A withered wreath, have distilled

The fulness of one rare phial,

  Whose nimble life shall outrun

The circling shadow on the dial,

  Outlast the tyrannous sun.

The end