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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. In the second stanza of Part V of "Four Quartets: East Coker", where is it stated that one starts from?

2. Where, in Part II of "Four Quartets: East Coker", have the houses all gone?

3. To which of the following are the lines of the fifth of the "Five Finger Exercises" addressed?

4. In the second stanza of Part III of "Four Quartets: Burnt Norton", into what world does the speaker say to descend?

5. The juice of what does Mr. Hodgson press on "his palate fine" in "Five Finger Exercises"?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. What is meant in "Burnt Norton" by the phrase, "Only a flicker / Over the strained time-ridden faces / Distracted from distraction by distraction"?

4. Why do the "cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries," spoken of in the first chorus from 'The Rock,' bring man further away from God and closer to dust?

5. What is the apparent distinction between the attitude towards Christmas of the child and the childish in "The Cultivation of Christmas Trees"?

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

7. What characterizes the tone of the poem in "Difficulties of a Statesman"?

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

9. Why does the speaker of "Lines for an Old Man" compare himself with a tiger?

10. What is the tone of the five parts of the "Five-Finger Exercises" and how is this indicated?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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?

Essay Topic 2

Much of Eliot's poetry, particularly in the periods between 1925-1930, is considered to be related to the process of man's conversion from atheism to Christianity. Using several of Eliot's poems from this six year period, discuss the nature of this process in an analytical essay of careful consideration. What is a conversion? What sorts of things influence a man's conversion? How are these things described in Eliot's poems? What do such influential things offer that the rest of the world cannot? Why is such a conversion nonetheless difficult to make?

Essay Topic 3

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?

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