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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. The speaker of "Ash Wednesday" informs a lady in Part II that what sat under a juniper tree?

2. At what time does "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" begin?

3. For what does the speaker in "A Song for Simeon" wait like a feather on the back of his hand?

4. Upon what is the "True Church" in The Hippopotamus based?

5. How many servants did "Aunt Helen" have?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the significance of the "guardians of the faith" keeping watch upon the shelves in "Cousin Nancy"?

2. What is a possible interpretation of the line, "Teach us to care and not to care" in "Ash-Wednesday"?

3. What is the meaning of the phrase in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" , "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons"?

4. Why does the speaker not want Pipit in Heaven in "A Cooking Egg"?

5. What does the "Boston Evening Transcript" seem to symbolize in the poem of the same name?

6. What sort of people are the "nightingales" among whom Sweeney cavorts in "Sweeney Among the Nightingales"?

7. How has Simeon passed his life, as described in "A Song for Simeon"?

8. What is the significance of the two stanzas concerned with Donne in "Whispers of Immortality"?

9. What sort of life did the speaker of "Gerontion" live?

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Prominent in Eliot's poetry is the temporal, ephemeral nature of the physical world. Analyze this theme in a critical essay. What is time? How is the world temporal? What is the effect of the passing nature of the world upon the human person? What does this reveal about the human person? What does the human person's involvement with time reveal about the nature of time?

Essay Topic 2

A subtle and often misinterpreted poem, "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service" features a complexity of thought on which the poem itself reflects. Examine this poem and provide an in-depth analysis of the poem's overall significance. What is the poem saying in its two individual halves? What is being said in each individual stanza? What is the meaning of the various images throughout the poem? How do they relate to one another? What is the overall literal significance of the poem? What does this overall literal significance indicate about the poem's deeper meaning? Most importantly, what is the significance of Sweeney in the poem?

Essay Topic 3

Literature and philosophy have often been considered close and sometimes overlapping disciplines of academic study and Western culture. That T.S. Eliot was well versed in both is demonstrated in his last major poems, the "Four Quartets". Select one of the "Four Quartets" and in a carefully planned critical essay, examine the relationship between its literary structure and its philosophical considerations. What are the philosophical topics approached in the poem? In what way does the poem consider things in abstraction? In what way is the poem a literary structure (operate on the definition of literature as the imaginative creation of character and/or action, according to the laws of possibility and necessity)? How does the literary structure corroborate the philosophical consideration? Wherein does one find the literary significance of the poem? Wherein is the philosophical consideration found?

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