When You Are Old Quizzes

When You Are Old Quiz

1 Which book did this poem first appear in?

The Tower

A Book of Irish Verse

The Rose

Cathleen Ní Houlihan
2 What does "glad" most closely mean in this work's context?

Happy

Comfortable

Pleasing

Soft
3 What is the poem's meter?

Free Verse

Dactylic Pentameter

Iambic Tetrameter

Iambic pentameter
4 Which real-life figure was the poem likely addressed to?

Maud Gonne

Georgiana Hyde-Lees

James Joyce

Teresa Deevy
5 Which best describes the relationship between the speaker and the addressee?

Political solidarity

Baseless hatred

Familial obligation

Lost love
6 Which of the following words is an instance of onomatopoeia?

Grace

Shadows

Crowd

Murmur
7 Which does NOT describe the poem's tone?

Melancholy

Zealous

Bitter

Regretful
8 How does the speaker characterize his own love as distinct?

He explains that he has loved the addressee for longer than anyone else

He implies that he loves the addressee for non-superficial reasons

He insists that his love is a mystical, almost magic force

He argues that he actually wants to help the addressee rather than just admire her
9 The poem's contrast between the home and the wilderness is an instance of which of the following?

Hyperbole

Personification

Parallelism

Juxtaposition
10 Which best describes the poem's setting?

A house in twentieth-century Ireland

A Victorian Dublin schoolyard

An abandoned castle in Europe

A magical realm
11 How many stanzas are in this poem?

Five

One

Four

Three
12 What is the poem's rhyme scheme?

ABC

ABBA

ABAB

AABB
13 Which line features alliterative G sounds?

When you are old and grey and full of sleep

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you

How many loved your moments of glad grace

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
14 Which emotion is personified in this poem?

Regret

Sadness

Love

Fury
15 Which of the following is true of Maud Gonne?

She was American

She was best known as a painter

She was opposed to Yeats's radical politics

She was an Irish revolutionary
16 Which of the following is true of this poem?

Its primary theme is the nature of consciousness

It is written in the second person

It is a direct commentary on Irish independence

It is written from the point of view of an inanimate object
17 Which is a conflict in the poem?

The tension between youthful passion and the jadedness of age

The dislike between the speaker and the woman he is engaged to

The fight between Irish revolutionaries and the British government

The disagreement between a young woman and her parents
18 Who is the poem's speaker?

A house remembering everything that has happened within its walls

An unidentified man, most likely a version of Yeats himself

A young woman looking forward to old age

An old man looking back at his youth
19 Which of the following is true of this poem and the way it engages with time?

It is about time travel to Ireland's past

It describes a person who cannot distinguish the past from the future

It mostly takes place in a hypothetical, imagined future

It takes place over a series of flashbacks
20 Which of the following themes does this poem engage with most?

Aging and time

Nature and its destruction

Motherhood

Music and art
21 This poem is based on an earlier work by whom?

Seamus Heaney

Pierre de Ronsard

Christina Rosetti

Petrarch
22 How is the addressee characterized by the speaker?

As a kind person whose anger disguises her good intentions

As a likable but cruel schemer

As a person so repressed by the norms of her time that she has no real personality

As superficially charming, but full of hidden depths
23 What types of stanzas are in the poem?

Octaves

Quatrains

Couplets

Tercets
24 The phrase "when you are old and grey" contains which of the following?

Simile

Allusion

End rhyme

Metonymy
25 Which of the following is one meaning of the word "pilgrim"?

Romantic and softhearted

Sickly

A traveler to a religious site

A gifted student

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Study Guide for When You Are Old

When You Are Old study guide contains a biography of William Butler Yeats, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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