Infant

• Man comes onto the earth as an infant, "mewling and puking in the nurse's arms." At this stage, man is helpless and appears to be without character. He arrives in a disgusting, grotesque state and depends on others for survival. Man is weak and without pride, instead being naive and natural.
  
  

School Child

• The school child has lost his naivete about the world. He is consumed with his basic existence. Shakespeare describes the school child as a "whining school-boy, with his satchel ... unwilling to go to school." School child is the second stage of boyhood before becoming a man. In this stage, he obsesses about school and how he to avoid his daily work.
  
  

Lover

• The schoolboy leaves adolescence and becomes a lover. He is "sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad." In this stage, man is melodramatic and ruled by his romantic feelings. He pours out his heart and is in love with love itself.
  
  

Soldier

• Man becomes a metaphorical soldier, "full of strange oaths" and "jealous in honor." Man is zealous and will do anything to achieve his ideals. He is temperamental and "sudden and quick in quarrel."
  
  

Adult

• Man changes from a zealous soldier to a placid adult. He possesses "eyes severe and beard of formal cut." He regards his former childishness as foolish and sees himself as "full of wise saws and modern instances." Rationality and intellectual thinking characterize man at this stage.
  
  

Elderly

• The serious adult changes to the old man. "With spectacles on nose and pouch on side" the old man realizes his "youthful hose, well sav'd" is a "world too wide." He must learn to abandon aspects of himself that are impossible to retain as he ages.
  
  

Death

• The elderly man grows older and must undergoes a "second childishness." He returns to traits he possessed in the first stage where depends on others. Life has reduced him to a child and the cycle is complete. He meets "mere oblivion" and goes to his grave: "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."