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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 do the seams need in "Marina"?

2. What do people enjoy about marches like the one described in the "Triumphal March"?

3. Whose hands wove the "intolerable shirt of flame" in Part IV of "Four Quartets: Little Gidding"?

4. What two things are made one in the "crowned knot of fire" discussed at the end of Part V of "Four Quartets: Little Gidding"?

5. In "To the Indians Who Died in Africa," whom should a man see in the dust in front of his own door at sunset?

Short Essay Questions

1. What characterizes the metaphors used as description of the old man bearing the "tooth of wit" in "Lines for an Old Man"?

2. What are the women doing with the card game in the "Fragment of a Prologue"?

3. What does the speaker mean by saying that "Our only health is the disease" in Part IV of "East Coker"?

4. What is implied by the repetition of the phrase "meaning / Death," in reference to the various stages of life's enjoyment in "Marina"?

5. Where is the reader told to go and why in the third landscape, "Usk"?

6. What is characteristic of the gods described in all of the sections aside from Part IV of "The Dry Salvages"?

7. What is a possible interpretation of the significance of the "Midwinter spring" described in Part I of "Little Gidding"?

8. How was the speaker awoken in "The wind sprang up at four o'clock"?

9. How is the "Mr. Eliot" of the "Five-Finger Exercises" satirized?

10. What is implied about the owner of the eyes about whom the speaker is talking in "Eyes that last I saw in tears"?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Few poems, if any, have had as profound an impact on the world of poetry and literature as "The Waste Land", and yet its interpretation remains a subject of great dispute. In your own critical analysis, provide an interpretation of this complex and multi-layered poem. What is the significance of the major images and characters in the poem? What is meant by the often obscure and cryptic language? What is the relationship of the five parts to one another? What is the significance of the frequent inclusion of water as a symbolic figure in the poem? What is the overall, coherent signification of the poem?

Essay Topic 2

In "Choruses from 'The Rock'", it is postulated that man without the Church at the center of his life is lost. Analyze this claim in a critical essay that evaluates the messages put forth in all ten of the choruses. What is the Church itself? What does the Church provide man that the rest of the world cannot? What happens to the rest of the world, particularly insofar as men interact with it, if men put the Church at the center of their lives? What does this indicate about the nature of humanity, at least in the way that Eliot perceives it and portrays it in "Choruses from 'The Rock'"?

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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