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 Rose

Cathleen Ní Houlihan

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

Happy

Comfortable

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

Free Verse

Dactylic Pentameter

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

Maud Gonne

James Joyce

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

Lost love

Familial obligation

Baseless hatred
6 Which of the following words is an instance of onomatopoeia?
Crowd

Murmur

Shadows

Grace
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 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

He insists that his love is a mystical, almost magic force
9 The poem's contrast between the home and the wilderness is an instance of which of the following?
Hyperbole

Personification

Juxtaposition

Parallelism
10 Which best describes the poem's setting?
A house in twentieth-century Ireland

A magical realm

A Victorian Dublin schoolyard

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

Three

Five

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

ABBA

AABB

ABAB
13 Which line features alliterative G sounds?
How many loved your moments of glad grace

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

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?
Fury

Regret

Love

Sadness
15 Which of the following is true of Maud Gonne?
She was American

She was opposed to Yeats's radical politics

She was best known as a painter

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 from the point of view of an inanimate object

It is a direct commentary on Irish independence

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 disagreement between a young woman and her parents

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

The fight between Irish revolutionaries and the British government
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

An old man looking back at his youth

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 mostly takes place in a hypothetical, imagined future

It is about time travel to Ireland's past

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?
Music and art

Nature and its destruction

Motherhood

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

Petrarch

Seamus Heaney

Pierre de Ronsard
22 How is the addressee characterized by the speaker?
As a kind person whose anger disguises her good intentions

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

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

Couplets

Tercets

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

Simile

End rhyme

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

A traveler to a religious site

Sickly

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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