Poem of the Day - Part 94

 Seven Ages of Man
by Robert Conquest

This is a limerick written by Robert Conquest as a humorous summary of Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man from the famous passage beginning "All the world's a stage" in the play As You Like It.  To appreciate how clever the limerick is, you can read Shakespeare's original at the end of this post.

I've taken the limerick one step further by adding illustrations, though they may not be exactly what Robert Conquest (or Shakespeare) had in mind.

Seven ages: first puking and mewling;

Then very pissed off with his schooling;

Then fucks

and then fights;

Then judging men's rights;

Then sitting in slippers;

then drooling.

*          *          *

To compare, here is Shakespeare's original from As You Like It:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,

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,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion;

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.