NAME______PERIOD______
“7 AGES OF MAN” Mrs. Nelson
WILLIAM SHAKESPEAREPG.734
1.List the 7 different people mentioned by the speaker. What stage of life does each person represent?
The infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, judge, old man-they represent infancy, childhood, young adulthood,middle age, old age, and the very elderly______
2. How does the speaker describe the soldier and judge? Are they characterized positively or negatively?
____makes soldier seem quick to fight, not honorable, but arrogant and quick-tempered______
_makes judges look like they are rich and fatbellied, like they eat well, sounds like he if full of wisdom_____
3.What items do the people in the last stage lack? How has the cycle come full circle?
______no teeth, no eyes, no taste, without everything…it’s like when they were born without teeth and taste etc. The cycle is back the to beginning and the man is helpless again like a baby.______
4.What is the speaker’s attitude towards life?
______It’s very cynical, as if you must go through all of these things and you do not have a choice in your life. No matter what you do in life, you can become educated or famous or rich, but you will still end up like a baby and helpless at the end of life.______
5.If you could meet this speaker, what stage of life would you like to discuss with him? Why?
______opinion______
6.What metaphor does the speaker use to describe the world?
______He says the world is a stage and everyone in it is just an actor. We are all actors because we play certain parts in life, but using actor also makes it seem like everything in life is fake because actors are pretending. ______
7.Give me an example of alliteration from the poem.
_shrunk shank, His youthful hose well sav’d, a world too wide______
8.Is this a lyric poem or a narrative poem? How do you know? Fixed or free?
______lyric, it does not tell a story with characters, a plot, and action. It is free form because there is no set rhyme scheme or certain numbers of lines.______
9.Give me an example of a simile in the poem.
____bearded like the pard,__the lover sighing like a furnace, creeping like a snail,______
10. Write 2 examples of iambic pentameter from the poem.
1. and one man in his time plays many parts, mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms,and shining morning face creeping like snail, full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, in fair round belly, with good capon lin’d, with eyes severe and beard of formal cut, full of wise saws and modern instances, And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts, Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
12.Give an example of hyperbole. Tell why Shakespeare used hyperbole here.
And then the lover,/Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ball/Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. He is using the exaggeration to also explain how teenagers are overdramatic and also exaggerate. His youthful hose well sav’d, a world too wide. He uses to exaggeration to show how much the man has changed and to show how skinny he has become.