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?
Soft

Pleasing

Happy

Comfortable
3 What is the poem's meter?
Iambic Tetrameter

Iambic pentameter

Dactylic Pentameter

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

Teresa Deevy

Maud Gonne

James Joyce
5 Which best describes the relationship between the speaker and the addressee?
Lost love

Baseless hatred

Familial obligation

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

Shadows

Grace

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 insists that his love is a mystical, almost magic force

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

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

Parallelism

Personification
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?
ABC

ABBA

AABB

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

How many loved your moments of glad grace

When you are old and grey and full of sleep

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

Regret

Sadness

Fury
15 Which of the following is true of Maud Gonne?
She was best known as a painter

She was an Irish revolutionary

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

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

It is written in the second person

Its primary theme is the nature of consciousness
17 Which is a conflict in the poem?
The fight between Irish revolutionaries and the British government

The tension between youthful passion and the jadedness of age

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

The disagreement between a young woman and her parents
18 Who is the poem's speaker?
A young woman looking forward to old age

An unidentified man, most likely a version of Yeats himself

A house remembering everything that has happened within its walls

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 describes a person who cannot distinguish the past from the future

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
20 Which of the following themes does this poem engage with most?
Motherhood

Music and art

Nature and its destruction

Aging and time
21 This poem is based on an earlier work by whom?
Christina Rosetti

Pierre de Ronsard

Petrarch

Seamus Heaney
22 How is the addressee characterized by the speaker?
As a person so repressed by the norms of her time that she has no real personality

As a kind person whose anger disguises her good intentions

As a likable but cruel schemer

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

Tercets

Quatrains

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

Metonymy

Allusion

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

Sickly

A traveler to a religious site

Romantic and softhearted

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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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