For all his literary output — novels, short fiction, essays, screenplays, lectures, and poems — Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) strikes us now as less a writer than a figure: not merely a figure of the twentieth century, but a figure for so much of it. We remember him, of course, chiefly for his fifth novel, the dystopian 1932 “Brave New World,” envisioning an amoral global state and its “impersonal generation,” to borrow a phrase from an earlier Huxley novel, the 1921 social satire “Crome Yellow.”

In his own day, he was famously a pacificist, a lecturer on the evils of overpopulation, and, in a prefigurement of the enthusiasms of the later 1960s, a devotee of Eastern mysticism and an experimenter in psychedelic drugs. Winning what Christopher Bonanos has called “the championship trophy for a badly timed death,” Huxley shares his death day with both C.S. Lewis and John F. Kennedy. As Bonanos observes, “Huxley, at least, made it interesting. At his request, his wife shot him up with LSD, . . . and he tripped his way out of this world.”

Given all that, today’s early-career poem, “Life and Art,” seems uncharacteristically quaint, even archaic, in its autumnal reflection. Except for the fact that it consists of four trimeter abab quatrains, not three quatrains and a couplet, it might almost be a Shakespearean sonnet, contrasting the fleetness of human existence and happiness with the relative immortality of art. The roses drop their petals and die, but the distilled essence of those dried petals — so the poem insists, anyway — will “outlast the tyrannous sun.”

Life and Art
by Aldous Huxley

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.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.