My Philosophy Of Life - Analysis

A mind trying to renovate itself

The poem’s central drama is a speaker attempting to install a new self—a philosophy of life—only to discover that the mind doesn’t accept principles the way a house accepts new furniture. The opening is almost comic exhaustion: wasn't room enough for another thought, and then suddenly a great idea. But that idea is immediately undercut by practicality: OK, but which ones? The speaker wants a life run according to a set of principles, yet he also knows, from the start, that the attempt will change everything in small, embarrassing places: eating watermelon, going to the bathroom, waiting on a subway platform, even worrying about rain forests. What looks like self-improvement quickly becomes a threat to the ordinary.

The tone moves in a distinctly Ashbery way: breezy and conversational, then suddenly spooked. The speaker keeps promising moderation—I wouldn't be preachy, he’ll care for children and old people only in the generic way a clockwork universe permits—yet the very language of his plan is intrusive. He won’t simply change; he’ll inject life with a serum from a new moral climate. That word choice makes the philosophy feel less like wisdom than like an experiment performed on the day-to-day.

The secret passage: philosophy as accidental initiation

The poem’s most vivid image makes the whole project feel uncanny: the speaker is like a stranger who presses against a panel and a bookcase slides back, revealing a staircase with greenish light. Philosophy, in this vision, isn’t chosen so much as stumbled into—an initiation triggered by a careless bump. And once it opens, custom takes over: he automatically steps inside, and the bookcase slides shut, sealing him into the new mode of life. The image suggests a trap disguised as discovery: the speaker wanted a manageable set of principles, but instead he’s inside a hidden architecture of thought, lit strangely, difficult to exit.

Even the sensory details refuse clarity. A fragrance overwhelms him, not saffron and not lavender but something in between. That in-between-ness becomes a miniature version of the poem’s whole argument: the new philosophy can’t be named cleanly, only triangulated. It produces associations rather than conclusions—cushions, and an uncle’s Boston bull terrier watching quizzically, with pointed ear-tips. The mind slides from moral ambition to oddly tender memory, as if the promised system dissolves into private, half-ridiculous detail. The philosophical “staircase” leads, not to doctrine, but to the cluttered attic of consciousness.

The rush that yields no ideas

After the secret-door sequence, the poem hits a blunt hinge: the great rush is on, and then the anti-climax—Not a single idea appears. The speaker’s confession is almost angry: it’s enough to disgust you with thought. This is one of the poem’s key tensions: philosophy is imagined as a set of usable principles, yet the lived experience of “thinking hard” produces blankness, nausea, and overflow. The mind wants to be guided, but it keeps generating weather, smell, dog-ears, subway platforms—anything except the clean “principles” it asked for.

Still, the poem doesn’t simply renounce thinking. It performs a salvage operation through a half-remembered authority: William James, invoked via something the speaker never read. That admission matters. The speaker wants the prestige of intellectual tradition, but he reaches it through hearsay and atmosphere: the book had fineness, the powder of life dusted over it by chance, and it still looked for evidence of fingerprints. Philosophy becomes less a set of propositions than a handled object, marked by other people’s touch. The poem suggests that what matters isn’t a pure thought his and his alone, but the way thought is already social, already smudged with prior handling—even when we insist on its privacy.

Public toilets and the democracy of crude messages

The poem then deliberately lowers the register: It's fine, in summer to visit the seashore, to take little trips, to pass a grove of fledgling aspens—and then, nearby, the public toilets. That proximity is a statement. Any philosophy that can’t survive the embarrassing adjacency of aspens and toilets is a fantasy. The speaker notices how weary pilgrims carve names and addresses, even messages to the world, while sitting and planning what they’ll do after they wash their hands and step into the open again. It’s a comic tableau, but also unexpectedly serious: these carvings are people insisting they exist, leaving a mark where no one is supposed to linger.

The speaker’s question sharpens the poem’s contradiction: were these people coaxed in by principles, and were their words a kind of philosophy, even if crude? The poem refuses to protect philosophy as an elite activity. If a man scrawls his address above a toilet, that might be his metaphysics: identity, loneliness, the desire to be found. Yet the speaker can’t keep going: I can move no farther; something's blocking the thought, something he’s not big enough to see over. The blockage reads like fear of what the question implies—that “principles” may be indistinguishable from impulse, habit, or graffiti, and that the speaker’s lofty renovation project might be no more dignified than a scratched message in a stall.

A compromise of preserves against futility

The turn toward confession—maybe I'm frankly scared—is also a turn toward compromise. The speaker asks, with genuine vulnerability, What was the matter with how he acted before. The poem doesn’t answer directly, but it shows the emotional cost of seeking a totalizing system: it makes the old self feel suddenly wrong without proving why. So the speaker proposes a middling, humane alternative: I'll let things be what they are, sort of. That phrase sort of is crucial; it’s a refusal of purity. He will, in autumn, put up jellies and preserves against the winter cold and futility. The act is domestic, seasonal, almost old-fashioned, and the poem calls it both human and intelligent. Instead of injecting the world with moral serum, he will do a small, sustaining task that admits winter is coming and doesn’t pretend to solve it.

Even here, the speaker can’t stop the social anxieties that complicate any “philosophy.” He vows not to be embarrassed by his friends’ dumb remarks, or his own, and admits that’s the hardest part. In a crowded theater, something he says riles the person in front, who doesn’t even like two people talking. The speaker’s sudden violent metaphor—he’s got to be flushed out so hunters can take a crack at him—is funny but also revealing. Under the wish for calm principles is a hot wish to retaliate, to win. The poem insists that a “philosophy of life” has to include this uglier pressure: irritation, competitiveness, the pleasure of imagining someone else driven from hiding.

The poem’s final bet: the gaps between ideas

The closing resolves the earlier disgust with thought by redefining where value lies. You can't always worry about others and keep track of yourself simultaneously; total self-monitoring becomes abusive and joyless, like attending the wedding of strangers. Then comes the poem’s most generous claim: There's a lot of fun in the gaps between ideas, and That's what they're made for! The speaker ends by addressing you, urging enjoyment of life and even enjoyment of a personal philosophy, because They don't come along every day. The final warning—Look out! There's a big one...—keeps the mood from settling. Even enjoyment is threatened by the next incoming “idea,” the next wave that could capsize the compromise.

Challenging implication: if the best part is the gap, what happens when a philosophy actually succeeds—when it fills the head completely? The poem’s opening fear of wasn't room enough returns as a caution: a perfectly coherent system may be the most joyless outcome, because it leaves no space for the bull terrier’s quizzical ears, the toilet pilgrim’s message, the jar of preserves, or the sudden, ridiculous theater rage. The poem doesn’t deny thinking; it argues that thinking is livable only when it leaves air in the room.