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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does the speaker of East Coker parallel with "death" in the final lines of Part I of "East Coker"?

2. What does the derived knowledge, spoken of in Part II of "East Coker" impose and falsify?

3. By what is the "sultry light" absorbed in Part I of "East Coker"?

4. With what does the "periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion" leave one to wrestle, as stated in the second part of "East Coker"'?

5. In Part II of "East Coker," against what does the "Scorpion" fight?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does the speaker mean by commanding, in Part III of "East Coker," that one wait without hoping or loving, and that "the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting"?

2. Who is the "wounded surgeon" of Part IV of "East Coker," and what indicates this within the stanza?

3. What is the significance of the statement in the fifth part of "Burnt Norton," "Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break... Will not stay still"?

4. How is the "here" of Part III of "Burnt Norton" described, and what is significant about this description?

5. What is an interpretative possibility for the final four lines of the first part of "East Coker"?

6. What is signified by the statement "Distracted from distraction by distraction" in "Burnt Norton"'s third part?

7. What is the significance of the first 13 lines of "East Coker"?

8. What is meant by the "intolerable wrestled / With words and meanings" in the second part of "East Coker"?

9. What is signified by the phrase in Part III of "East Coker," "the growing terror of nothing to think about"?

10. What might be meant by the statement of the bird at the end of "Burnt Norton"'s first part, that "human kind / Cannot bear very much reality"?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Each of The Four Quartets is both united to the others and yet distinct with a complete meaning unto itself. Discuss the principal themes in "Burnt Norton," including time, the past, stillness, motion, and pattern, indicating the ways in which they are unified and present a coherent thought. How are these themes presented in the poem? What unites them? How are they, as a coherent whole, related to the other poems in the work? What is the significance of these relations? How do they help to unveil the overall meaning of "Burnt Norton"? How does this overall meaning contribute to interpretation of the whole work?

Essay Topic 2

One of the most complicated metaphysical threads running through The Four Quartets is Eliot's conception of Time as a whole. It is constantly surrounded by paradoxes and non sequitur. In a thorough and thoughtful analytical essay, unpack the complications surrounding Eliot's conception of Time. How does his thinking contrast with that of convention? How are the past, present, and future distinct and yet comparable? In what do they each consist? How are they unified? How is time an imperfection? How is man outside of time? How is man nonetheless constrained to temporal existence?

Essay Topic 3

Pat III of "East Coker" is eminently concerned with man's feelings of anxiety in the modern world, particularly as he is left with a sense of being conscious of nothing, or the content of the things of which he is conscious being essentially nothing. Examine this prevalence of anxiety as it is presented in the poem. What is anxiety? What does anxiety do to a person? In the face of what is man made anxious? Why does he have these feelings of anxiety? What does this indicate about the nature of the human person? What does this indicate about the nature of the things with which man regularly occupies himself in the world? How is this significant to the meaning of the poem as a whole? How is it significant to the whole of The Four Quartets?

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