Unit 6  Section 1Exercise 3Life cycles
This page contains some excerpts from poems by different poets, specifically reflecting on life experience related to a particular age. The final excerpt is the famous Jacques speech from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” These readings are important in that they introduce the themes of aging as a life-long experience and of the developmental stages associated with aging. See the following clinical correlate to enhance your experience of these readings, and answer the study questions.
How aging progresses depends on comorbidities. View the graphs comparing the body's slope of decline with cancer, heart and lung disease, and increasing frailty. See also the graph demonstrating slow progression towards death. For other graphic models of dying see Unit 7
From Billy Collins, “On turning ten”
The whole idea of it makes me feel
Like I’m coming down with something,
Something worse than any stomache ache
….a kind of measles of the spirit
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
As I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
Time to turn the first big number.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe
There was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.
From Lynn Rigney Schott, "Spring training”
This is my thirty-fifth spring:
still I am a novice at my work,
confused and frightened and angry.
Unlike me, the buds do not hesitate,
the hills are confident they will be
perfectly reflected
In the glass of the river.
..a black-and-white postcard picture
of my father….
Handsome, single-minded, he looks ready.
Thirty-five years of warmups.
Like glancing down at the scorecard
in your lap for half a second
and when you look up it’s done—
a long fly ball, moonlike,
into the night
over the fence,
way out of reach.
From J.D. McClatchy, Late night ode
It’s over love. Look at me pushing fifty now,
Hair like grave-grass growing in both ears,
The piles and boggy prosate, the crooked penis,
The sour tastes of each day’s first lie…
Try the blond boychick lawyer, entry level
At eighty grand, who pouts about the overtime,
Keeps Evian and a beeper in his locker at the gym,
And hash in tinfoil under the office fern.
There’s your hound from heaven, with buccaneer
Curls and perfumed war-paint on his nipples.
His answering machine always has room for one more
Slurred, embarrassed call from you-know-who….
So why these stubborn tears? And why do I dream
Almost every night of holding you again,
Or at least of diving after you, my long-gone,
Through the bruised unbalanced waves?
Jacques’ speech (7 stages of man)
http://ise.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/lifesubj+1.html See this web page for pop-up definitions of asterisked words
Jacques: 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.
Then the whining schoolboy, 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 canon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon* lined,
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 slippered pantaloon*
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, 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.
(As You Like It, 2. 7. 139-167)
Study questions
- Compare and contrast the subjective descriptions of aging in this section with the objective models. Is one more ‘true’ than the other?
- When does aging begin? What positive lesson can one learn by reading about the specific nature and tasks of different stages of life?
- Identify some of the developmental tasks related to getting older and the physical adjustments of older age. How are these two worlds related?
- Discuss the difference between chronological and biological age.
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