When You Are Old Quizzes

When You Are Old Quiz

1 Which book did this poem first appear in?
The Tower

Cathleen Ní Houlihan

A Book of Irish Verse

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

Comfortable

Happy

Soft
3 What is the poem's meter?
Iambic pentameter

Dactylic Pentameter

Iambic Tetrameter

Free Verse
4 Which real-life figure was the poem likely addressed to?
Teresa Deevy

James Joyce

Georgiana Hyde-Lees

Maud Gonne
5 Which best describes the relationship between the speaker and the addressee?
Lost love

Familial obligation

Baseless hatred

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?
Regretful

Zealous

Bitter

Melancholy
8 How does the speaker characterize his own love as distinct?
He argues that he actually wants to help the addressee rather than just admire her

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 implies that he loves the addressee for non-superficial reasons
9 The poem's contrast between the home and the wilderness is an instance of which of the following?
Hyperbole

Parallelism

Juxtaposition

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

An abandoned castle in Europe

A house in twentieth-century Ireland

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

Four

Five

Three
12 What is the poem's rhyme scheme?
ABC

ABAB

ABBA

AABB
13 Which line features alliterative G sounds?
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

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you
14 Which emotion is personified in this poem?
Regret

Fury

Sadness

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

She was opposed to Yeats's radical politics

She was best known as a painter

She was American
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 disagreement between a young woman and her parents

The fight between Irish revolutionaries and the British government

The dislike between the speaker and the woman he is engaged to
18 Who is the poem's speaker?
A house remembering everything that has happened within its walls

A young woman looking forward to old age

An old man looking back at his youth

An unidentified man, most likely a version of Yeats himself
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 mostly takes place in a hypothetical, imagined future

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

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

Aging and time

Motherhood

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

Pierre de Ronsard

Seamus Heaney

Christina Rosetti
22 How is the addressee characterized by the speaker?
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

As a likable but cruel schemer
23 What types of stanzas are in the poem?
Tercets

Quatrains

Octaves

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

Simile

Allusion

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

Romantic and softhearted

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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