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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. Where are "they" rattling breakfast plates in "Morning at the Window"?

2. In "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service", the masters of what sort of schools are considered controversial and polymath?

3. To what animal's path will the speaker of "A Song for Simeon" children's children take?

4. When does the hippo's voice betray "inflexions hoarse and odd"?

5. The "voice" in the second part of "Portrait of a Lady" says that her auditor, the poem's speaker, has no what?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Mr. Apollinax contrast with his hosts?

2. What is the significance of the lion made tame in the final stanza of "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar"?

3. What does the reception of the viaticum in "Animula" do for the soul?

4. What is a possible interpretation of the last two lines of "Whispers of Immortality", "But our lot crawls between dry ribs / To keep our metaphysics warm"?

5. What is the tone of the speaker towards his life in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night", and how is this indicated in the poem?

6. What evidently characterizes the woman in "Hysteria"?

7. For what does Simeon hope in his encounter with the Christ child?

8. For what is the speaker yearning in "La Figlia che Piange", and what indicates this?

9. What characterizes the speech of the stuffed men in "The Hollow Men"?

10. What is implied by stating in "The Hippopotamus" that the "True Church need never stir / To gather in its dividends"?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

A persistent theme throughout Eliot's later poetry, from "Ash-Wednesday" onwards, is the power of faith in the decaying world, which is the theme of Eliot's earlier poetry. Provide your own critical analysis of this theme, drawing upon texts from several of Eliot's poems. What is the essential nature of the world around man as described in Eliot's poems? How does modernity contribute to this nature? What is there for man to find in the modern world? In contradistinction, what is found in faith? How does faith contradict the nature of the modern world? What is described as lacking in Eliot's early poems but found in a different way in his later poems?

Essay Topic 2

The majority of T.S. Eliot's poetry is written in the deliberately unstructured form of free verse. Prior to Eliot, many poets considered this an inferior form, and in some cases, not a form at all. Evaluate Eliot's use of free verse in one or more of his poems, and judge whether or not it is truly poetic. What does free verse enable the poet to do that regularly structured meter does not? What effects does the free verse employed by Eliot produce? How does the free verse employed by Eliot produce effects? In the poem chosen, what particular effects does the free verse used produce? Why is this fitting for the poem's overall meaning? In what way is the poem truly or not truly poetic because of the free verse form?

Essay Topic 3

Frequently appearing in T.S. Eliot's poetry, explicitly in the later poems such as "Animula", "Choruses from 'The Rock'", and the "Four Quartets", and implicitly by its total lack in the earlier poems, such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Hollow Men", is the theme of hope. Analyze the two ways in which this is a prominent topic for Eliot, drawing upon several poems as sources. What is the nature of hope? In what ways is hope lost or absent? What contributes to the loss of hope? Contrariwise, in what is hope to be found? How is hope to be had? What contributes to the possession of hope? What does hope do for human persons?

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