When You Are Old Quizzes

When You Are Old Quiz

1 Which book did this poem first appear in?

A Book of Irish Verse

Cathleen Ní Houlihan

The Rose

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?

Iambic Tetrameter

Free Verse

Iambic pentameter

Dactylic Pentameter
4 Which real-life figure was the poem likely addressed to?

Teresa Deevy

Georgiana Hyde-Lees

James Joyce

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

Familial obligation

Political solidarity

Lost love

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

Grace

Crowd

Murmur

Shadows
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 insists that his love is a mystical, almost magic force

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?

Parallelism

Juxtaposition

Hyperbole

Personification
10 Which best describes the poem's setting?

A house in twentieth-century Ireland

A Victorian Dublin schoolyard

A magical realm

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

Three

Five

One

Four
12 What is the poem's rhyme scheme?

ABAB

ABBA

ABC

AABB
13 Which line features alliterative G sounds?

When you are old and grey and full of sleep

How many loved your moments of glad grace

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

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

Sadness

Love

Regret

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?

Its primary theme is the nature of consciousness

It is a direct commentary on Irish independence

It is written in the second person

It is written from the point of view of an inanimate object
17 Which is a conflict in the poem?

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

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 old man looking back at his youth

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 takes place over a series of flashbacks

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

It mostly takes place in a hypothetical, imagined future

It is about time travel to Ireland's past
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

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 superficially charming, but full of hidden depths

As a person so repressed by the norms of her time that she has no real personality

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

Octaves

Quatrains

Couplets

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

Allusion

Metonymy

Simile

End rhyme
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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