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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. In what must the speaker "freeze / And quake" in order to be warmed, as described in "East Coker"'s fourth part?
(a) Icy winds of loss.
(b) Frigid purgatorial fires.
(c) Endless smoke of briars.
(d) Breath torrid and unworthy.

2. By what is the "sultry light" absorbed in Part I of "East Coker"?
(a) The shimmering water.
(b) The grey stone.
(c) The violent gaze.
(d) The passing van.

3. The speaker states, in the first part of "Burnt Norton," that what "might have been" is a(n) what?
(a) A perpetual possibility.
(b) An unrealized actuality.
(c) A passive potency.
(d) A frivolous thought.

4. Where, according to the speaker in the third part of "East Coker," do they "all go into"?
(a) The light.
(b) Art.
(c) The civil service.
(d) The dark.

5. In the opening eight lines of the third part of "East Coker", the speaker mentions the "Directory of" what?
(a) Stars.
(b) Papers.
(c) Directors.
(d) Lights.

Short Answer Questions

1. In what way does the world move, according to the final three lines of Part II of "Burnt Norton"?

2. Words and music are said to move, in the fifth part of "Burnt Norton," only in what?

3. What goes in and out of "unwholesome lungs" in Part III of "Burnt Norton"?

4. What, in the first line of "Burnt Norton," Part IV, are "time and the bell" said to have buried?

5. The speaker questions whether or not who had "deceived us / Or deceived themselves" in Part II of "East Coker"?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is an interpretative possibility for the scene the speaker describes in the open field in the first part of "East Coker"?

2. What is meant by "Only by the form, the pattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness" in "Burnt Norton"'s fifth part?

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

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

5. What does the speaker mean in Part IV of "East Coker" when he states that "Our only health is the disease"?

6. 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"?

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

8. What is meant in "Burnt Norton"'s first part by "What might have been... a world of speculation," lines 6-8?

9. Why does the speaker of "East Coker" want only to hear of the folly of old men, in Part II of "East Coker"?

10. What does it mean to say, as the speaker does in the final line of Part II of "Burnt Norton," that "Only through time time is conquered"?

(see the answer keys)

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