In the poem "To Everything There Is a Season," are all activities the poet mentions permanent? Or do they come or go? How do you know?

The poem begins with the statement that everything has its season. This implies a seasonal rhythm like the seasons in nature. However, the first example given is "a time to be born and a time to die." One might immediately think of the birth and death of a person, or the birth and death of oneself, which only happens once in the given person's lifetime. That death is permanent.

All the other events in the poem speak to things that are cyclical or recurring. Planting and reaping happen each year in spring and fall. People know that laughing and weeping are cyclical: Although when one is extremely sad, it feels like one will never laugh again, even devastating sorrow recedes in its intensity, allowing the grief-stricken person to eventually laugh again. Breaking down and building up, keeping and throwing away, and ripping out seams and sewing them up again are all things that happen repeatedly in one's life. Loving and hating, keeping quiet and speaking, and winning and losing all happen over and over again for any given person.

Therefore, the only thing in the poem that seems of a permanent nature is death. From the context of the poem, one could infer that the poet wants to make the point that death, despite its seeming permanence, is in reality a part of a cycle that will lead to rebirth. This poem is rooted in the passage from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, part of the Hebrew scriptures that is one of the Wisdom books. Keeping that religious worldview in mind, one might interpret the poem as presenting the concept of resurrection and an afterlife, seeking to prove it by showing that everything that is known is cyclical. Based on inductive reasoning where one makes a conclusion about what is not known based on what is known, death is not permanent but will come around to birth again.