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?
Happy

Pleasing

Comfortable

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

Free Verse

Dactylic Pentameter

Iambic Tetrameter
4 Which real-life figure was the poem likely addressed to?
James Joyce

Teresa Deevy

Georgiana Hyde-Lees

Maud Gonne
5 Which best describes the relationship between the speaker and the addressee?
Political solidarity

Baseless hatred

Lost love

Familial obligation
6 Which of the following words is an instance of onomatopoeia?
Grace

Crowd

Shadows

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

Regretful

Melancholy

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

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

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?
Personification

Hyperbole

Parallelism

Juxtaposition
10 Which best describes the poem's setting?
An abandoned castle in Europe

A house in twentieth-century Ireland

A magical realm

A Victorian Dublin schoolyard
11 How many stanzas are in this poem?
Four

One

Five

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

ABAB

ABC

ABBA
13 Which line features alliterative G sounds?
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

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

Sadness

Love

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

She was American

She was an Irish revolutionary

She was opposed to Yeats's radical politics
16 Which of the following is true of this poem?
It is written in the second person

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

Its primary theme is the nature of consciousness

It is a direct commentary on Irish independence
17 Which is a conflict in the poem?
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

The tension between youthful passion and the jadedness of age
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

A young woman looking forward to old age

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 takes place over a series of flashbacks

It describes a person who cannot distinguish the past from the future
20 Which of the following themes does this poem engage with most?
Motherhood

Music and art

Aging and time

Nature and its destruction
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 superficially charming, but full of hidden depths

As a likable but cruel schemer

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?
Tercets

Quatrains

Octaves

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

Metonymy

Simile

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

A gifted student

Romantic and softhearted

A traveler to a religious site

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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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