When You Are Old Quizzes

When You Are Old Quiz

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

Cathleen Ní Houlihan

A Book of Irish Verse

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

Pleasing

Happy

Soft
3 What is the poem's meter?
Dactylic Pentameter

Iambic Tetrameter

Iambic pentameter

Free Verse
4 Which real-life figure was the poem likely addressed to?
Maud Gonne

James Joyce

Georgiana Hyde-Lees

Teresa Deevy
5 Which best describes the relationship between the speaker and the addressee?
Lost love

Familial obligation

Political solidarity

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

Shadows

Murmur

Crowd
7 Which does NOT describe the poem's tone?
Zealous

Regretful

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 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?
Parallelism

Hyperbole

Personification

Juxtaposition
10 Which best describes the poem's setting?
A magical realm

A Victorian Dublin schoolyard

An abandoned castle in Europe

A house in twentieth-century Ireland
11 How many stanzas are in this poem?
Four

One

Three

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

AABB

ABAB

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

When you are old and grey and full of sleep

How many loved your moments of glad grace

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

Regret

Fury

Love
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 written in the second person

It is a direct commentary on Irish independence
17 Which is a conflict in the poem?
The tension between youthful passion and the jadedness of age

The fight between Irish revolutionaries and the British government

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?
An old man looking back at his youth

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
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?
Nature and its destruction

Aging and time

Music and art

Motherhood
21 This poem is based on an earlier work by whom?
Christina Rosetti

Petrarch

Pierre de Ronsard

Seamus Heaney
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 a likable but cruel schemer

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

Octaves

Quatrains

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

Simile

Allusion

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

Sickly

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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