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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. What is the first of the "gifts reserved for age" that the speaker's interlocutor discloses in Part II of "Little Gidding"?
(a) The laceration / Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
(b) The rending pain of re-enactment / Of all that you have done, and been.
(c) The cold friction of expiring sense / Without enchantment.
(d) The conscious impotence of rage / At human folly.

2. In the first line of Part III of "Little Gidding," it is said that there are how many "conditions which often look alike / Yet differ completely"?
(a) A hundred.
(b) Nine.
(c) Three.
(d) Four.

3. The passengers on the train in Part III of "The Dry Salvages" are said to be not escaping from what?
(a) Life.
(b) The past.
(c) The future.
(d) Death.

4. According to the speaker in Part V of "Little Gidding," "the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive" where?
(a) Where no one has been before.
(b) Where we always were.
(c) Where time is not.
(d) Where we started.

5. The speaker states in "The Dry Salvages"'s last part that the "hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is" what?
(a) Incarnation.
(b) Annunciation.
(c) Annihilation.
(d) Invocation.

Short Answer Questions

1. The speaker says in Part I of "The Dry Salvages" that "Between midnight and dawn... the past is all" what?

2. Where, according to the first three lines of Part V of "Little Gidding," do "we start from?"

3. "Our own past is covered," says the speaker of Part II of "The Dry Salvages," "by the currents of" what?

4. The speaker says near the end of Part III of "Little Gidding" that "We have taken from the defeated / What they had to leave us--a" what?

5. The speaker asserts in Part II of "The Dry Salvages" that there "is no end, but" what?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is meant by the line, "You are not the same people who left that station," in Part III of "The Dry Salvages"?

2. What is an interpretative way to read the significance of the "ragged rock" being "what it always was," at the end of Part II of "The Dry Salvages"?

3. What is the meaning of "Behovely" as it is used in the phrase, found in Part III of "Little Gidding" that, "Sin is Behovely"?

4. What does the speaker mean in Part I of "The Dry Salvages" by "The tolling bell / Measures time not our time"?

5. What is meant by the phrase, in Part V of "Little Gidding," "Every poem [is] an epitaph"?

6. How can one be "redeemed from fire by fire," as is stated in Part IV of "Little Gidding"?

7. What is meant in Part III of "Little Gidding" by "not less of love but expanding / Of love beyond desire, and so liberation / From the future as well as the past"?

8. What is meant by the speaker's interlocutor's phrase that "next year's words await another voice" in Part II of "Little Gidding"?

9. What does the speaker mean in Part I of "Little Gidding" when he states that "This is the spring time / But not in time's covenant"?

10. What does the speaker mean by saying in Part V of "The Dry Salvages" that "to apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / With time, is an occupation for the saint"?

(see the answer keys)

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