PRIVATE PROPERTY

By Aldous Huxley

All fly — yet who is misanthrope?—

The actual men and things that pass

Jostling, to wither as the grass

So soon: and ( be it heaven's hope,

Or poetry's kaleidoscope,

Or love or wine, at feast, at mass )

Each owns a paradise of glass

Where never a yearning heliotrope

Pursues the sun's ascent or slope;

For the sun dreams there, and no time is or was.

Like fauns embossed in our domain,

We look abroad, and our calm eyes

Mark how the goatish gods of pain

Revel; and if by grim surprise

They break into our paradise,

Patient we build its beauty up again.