When You Are Old Quizzes

When You Are Old Quiz

1 Which book did this poem first appear in?
A Book of Irish Verse

The Tower

Cathleen Ní Houlihan

The Rose
2 What does "glad" most closely mean in this work's context?
Comfortable

Soft

Pleasing

Happy
3 What is the poem's meter?
Dactylic Pentameter

Iambic pentameter

Free Verse

Iambic Tetrameter
4 Which real-life figure was the poem likely addressed to?
Georgiana Hyde-Lees

Maud Gonne

Teresa Deevy

James Joyce
5 Which best describes the relationship between the speaker and the addressee?
Baseless hatred

Familial obligation

Lost love

Political solidarity
6 Which of the following words is an instance of onomatopoeia?
Murmur

Grace

Shadows

Crowd
7 Which does NOT describe the poem's tone?
Melancholy

Zealous

Regretful

Bitter
8 How does the speaker characterize his own love as distinct?
He implies that he loves the addressee for non-superficial reasons

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

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

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

Juxtaposition

Personification

Parallelism
10 Which best describes the poem's setting?
A Victorian Dublin schoolyard

A magical realm

A house in twentieth-century Ireland

An abandoned castle in Europe
11 How many stanzas are in this poem?
Three

One

Five

Four
12 What is the poem's rhyme scheme?
ABAB

ABC

ABBA

AABB
13 Which line features alliterative G sounds?
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

How many loved your moments of glad grace

When you are old and grey and full of sleep
14 Which emotion is personified in this poem?
Fury

Regret

Sadness

Love
15 Which of the following is true of Maud Gonne?
She was an Irish revolutionary

She was best known as a painter

She was American

She was opposed to Yeats's radical politics
16 Which of the following is true of this poem?
It is a direct commentary on Irish independence

Its primary theme is the nature of consciousness

It is written from the point of view of an inanimate object

It is written in the second person
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?
An old man looking back at his youth

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
19 Which of the following is true of this poem and the way it engages with time?
It takes place over a series of flashbacks

It is about time travel to Ireland's past

It mostly takes place in a hypothetical, imagined future

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

Seamus Heaney

Pierre de Ronsard

Christina Rosetti
22 How is the addressee characterized by the speaker?
As a likable but cruel schemer

As a kind person whose anger disguises her good intentions

As superficially charming, but full of hidden depths

As a person so repressed by the norms of her time that she has no real personality
23 What types of stanzas are in the poem?
Couplets

Quatrains

Octaves

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

End rhyme

Allusion

Simile
25 Which of the following is one meaning of the word "pilgrim"?
Romantic and softhearted

A gifted student

A traveler to a religious site

Sickly

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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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