The World in one blog post: Thoughts on Katharine Philips' poem, "The World"

The World
by Katharine Philips

We all live by mistake, delight in dreams,

Lost to ourselves, and dwelling in extremes;

Rejecting what we have, though ne’er so good,

And prizing what we never understood.

(lines 23-26)

Katherine Philips’ poem does a very good job of summarizing a theme set out at length in the Bible’s Ecclesiastes: Everything is vanity; there is nothing new under the sun. 

You would think that encapsulating universal human problems in one poem and then entitling it “The World” would be a huge undertaking. But somehow Philips seems to do it, from talking about mortality and human suffering to the problem of understanding why we are here, what is the purpose of life in the stanza quoted above.

“We all live by mistake”: we all, by trial and error in our lives, have to figure out who we are, what we are here for, and what we should do. Usually this trial and error leads to “dwelling in extremes”, and explains how so many worldview are on the opposite spectrum from each other (hedonism vs. stoicism, atheism vs. spirituality, political values of opposing parties, cynicism vs. idealism). 

During this trial and error we “[reject] what we have,” and are right in doing so, since it was “ne’er so good.” But instead of finding something better—or at least, that we know certainly is better—we prize things we “never understood.” We give up what we know is inferior for a dream that might be superior. Sometimes what we prize is merely a case of “the grass is always greener,” and once we have attained our dreams we realize we’ve chosen yet another inferior state of being. If that happens—or when that happens—the trial and error continues, and we move on to yet another dream. The cycle continues.

Although I do think this theme is universal, it seems particularly to resonate with the American culture nowadays. Isn’t the American dream (…we “delight in dreams”…) something we strive to find? Doesn’t the Declaration of Independence claim the right to “pursue happiness”? Life in the United States seems to be comprised of one attempt to find the ultimate form of happiness after another. People hop jobs, hoping for more money, more career satisfaction, better benefits, and higher prestige. People hop marriages, giving up one spouse and trying another that will “love them better” or “understand them better.” All our consumer culture is due, not only because of first-world greed, but also because we hope that owning more objects will make us more content. The more transient our life choices, the less permanent or significant our lives feel. 

Is there a solution to this? Aside from the obvious “don’t quit” moral, there is maybe one more thing: try to understand what you prize. If we “prize what we never understood,” we’ll be trapped in the trial and error cycle. If we consider what we truly prize—what our values, hopes, and true dreams are—and then learn to understand them, we should be able to make better decisions for our future. We won’t be as inclined to give up on things like jobs and family, nor be as fascinated with accumulating possessions, because we will know that, even in the midst of difficulty, the path we are on is the one we are meant to tread.