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 Rose

The Tower

Cathleen Ní Houlihan
2 What does "glad" most closely mean in this work's context?
Happy

Comfortable

Pleasing

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

Dactylic Pentameter

Iambic Tetrameter

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

Baseless hatred

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

Grace

Murmur

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

Melancholy

Zealous

Regretful
8 How does the speaker characterize his own love as distinct?
He insists that his love is a mystical, almost magic force

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

He argues that he actually wants to help the addressee rather than just admire her

He explains that he has loved the addressee for longer than anyone else
9 The poem's contrast between the home and the wilderness is an instance of which of the following?
Parallelism

Personification

Hyperbole

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

A house in twentieth-century Ireland

An abandoned castle in Europe

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

Four

One

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

ABC

ABBA

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

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you

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

Love

Fury

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

She was American

She was an Irish revolutionary

She was best known as a painter
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 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?
A young woman looking forward to old age

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
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?
Aging and time

Music and art

Nature and its destruction

Motherhood
21 This poem is based on an earlier work by whom?
Seamus Heaney

Christina Rosetti

Pierre de Ronsard

Petrarch
22 How is the addressee characterized by the speaker?
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

As a kind person whose anger disguises her good intentions
23 What types of stanzas are in the poem?
Tercets

Octaves

Couplets

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

Allusion

Metonymy

Simile
25 Which of the following is one meaning of the word "pilgrim"?
A traveler to a religious site

Sickly

Romantic and softhearted

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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