A view of life

By compare and contrast the poem of The Four Ages of Man by William Butler Yeats, a famous soliloquy from William Shakespeare's As You Like It, spoken by the melancholy Jaques and the riddle in Oedipus Rex ,I think that the three literary works share the same theme. The theme is about humanism in the world that experienced by man starts from the age that we were born until the end of our life.
In the speech As You Like It, Shakespeare writes more on the description of both physically and behavioral changes in every stages of man. Besides that, he divides the life of man into seven stages that are infant, school-boy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon, and second childhood, "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything". Shakespeare portrays human as the actors and we have to keep on acting from the baby until the old age on the theatrical stage. The descriptions are more visualized because the man’s acting is what we can observe in life. While, The Four Ages of Man divides the whole life of human into four stages begins with the infant followed by teenager, adult and ends with old age. The description of the stages is more abstract because it is not only deals with the physical of human but also the feelings. As in the poem, human struggles with the heart and mind. The last stanza discuss about the strength of God and the weaknesses of human. On the other hand, in Oedipus’s riddle human life is only being portrayed as three stages. As a baby he crawls on fours, then as a man he walks erect, then as an old man he uses cane. The riddle is very simple but it traces the changes of man vividly. Again, I think that the riddle is also focus on physical condition of man.
In a nutshell, the three literary works clearly give me the idea about humanism. As an ordinary man, we shall have gone through all of the stages but nothing last forever. I can sense that how incapable of man to control our life because gods will shall decides the end of our life.