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?
Pleasing

Soft

Comfortable

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

Iambic pentameter

Iambic Tetrameter

Dactylic 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?
Baseless hatred

Familial obligation

Lost love

Political solidarity
6 Which of the following words is an instance of onomatopoeia?
Crowd

Murmur

Grace

Shadows
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 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?
Hyperbole

Personification

Juxtaposition

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

An abandoned castle in Europe

A Victorian Dublin schoolyard

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

Four

Five

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

ABBA

ABC

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

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you

When you are old and grey and full of sleep

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
14 Which emotion is personified in this poem?
Fury

Regret

Love

Sadness
15 Which of the following is true of Maud Gonne?
She was an Irish revolutionary

She was opposed to Yeats's radical politics

She was best known as a painter

She was American
16 Which of the following is true of this poem?
It is written from the point of view of an inanimate object

Its primary theme is the nature of consciousness

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 dislike between the speaker and the woman he is engaged to

The fight between Irish revolutionaries and the British government

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 house remembering everything that has happened within its walls

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 describes a person who cannot distinguish the past from the future

It takes place over a series of flashbacks

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?
Nature and its destruction

Music and art

Aging and time

Motherhood
21 This poem is based on an earlier work by whom?
Pierre de Ronsard

Christina Rosetti

Petrarch

Seamus Heaney
22 How is the addressee characterized by the speaker?
As a person so repressed by the norms of her time that she has no real personality

As a kind person whose anger disguises her good intentions

As a likable but cruel schemer

As superficially charming, but full of hidden depths
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?
Metonymy

Simile

End rhyme

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

A traveler to a religious site

Sickly

A gifted student

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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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