Ages of Man

Writers tend to relate their writings with human’s life or experiences whether in plays, poems, short stories or even in novels. They like to talk about the stage of life and challenges that men going through in their life. For instance, the play "As You Like It" by William Shakespeare, the character Jacques makes a speech about seven ‘ages of man’ where the first age or stage is the infant, followed by whining school boy, then the lover, a soldier, the justice (a judge), a wise men and lastly second childishness meanings man becoming baby again as now they have no teeth, no eyes, no taste and no everything.
William Butler Yeats in his poem entitled "The Four Ages of Man" also talks about the stage of life of human being. Each of the four stanzas represents an age of man where they face different problems which getting more complex. In this poem, the first stanza reflects the physical struggle man faces in order to face the world. In the second stanza, man deals with emotion where now they’ll experience guilt and cause them to be more mature. In the third stanza, man intellectualizes things and become rational and finally in the fourth stanza, he talks about God and faith as human will die sooner or later though they try to avoid it.
As in the play "Oedipus Rex" by Sophocles, Oedipus has to answer a riddle asked by a Sphinx who sat outside of Thebes. The riddle also about ages of man and it sounds like this; What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening? The answer is a man, who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks on two legs as an adult, and walks with a cane in old age.