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

Happy

Pleasing

Comfortable
3 What is the poem's meter?
Free Verse

Dactylic Pentameter

Iambic Tetrameter

Iambic pentameter
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?
Baseless hatred

Political solidarity

Familial obligation

Lost love
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

Zealous

Melancholy

Regretful
8 How does the speaker characterize his own love as distinct?
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

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?
Juxtaposition

Personification

Parallelism

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

A house in twentieth-century Ireland

A Victorian Dublin schoolyard

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

Five

One

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

ABAB

ABC

AABB
13 Which line features alliterative G sounds?
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

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
14 Which emotion is personified in this poem?
Fury

Sadness

Regret

Love
15 Which of the following is true of Maud Gonne?
She was opposed to Yeats's radical politics

She was best known as a painter

She was an Irish revolutionary

She was American
16 Which of the following is true of this poem?
It is written in the second person

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
17 Which is a conflict in the poem?
The dislike between the speaker and the woman he is engaged to

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
18 Who is the poem's speaker?
An unidentified man, most likely a version of Yeats himself

A young woman looking forward to old age

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 takes place over a series of flashbacks

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

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?
Nature and its destruction

Aging and time

Motherhood

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

Pierre de Ronsard

Seamus Heaney

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

As superficially charming, but full of hidden depths

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
23 What types of stanzas are in the poem?
Quatrains

Tercets

Octaves

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

End rhyme

Metonymy

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

A traveler to a religious site

A gifted student

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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