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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 is desiccated when the speaker descends into a different world in the latter lines of "Burnt Norton," Part III?

2. What does the speaker state is the "cause and end of movement" in the fifth part of "Burnt Norton"?

3. The speaker says in Part II of "East Coker" that there is "only a limited value / In the knowledge derived from" what?

4. Which of the following is found at the still point of the world, as described in Part II?

5. Which flowers had "the look of flowers that are looked at" in Part I of "Burnt Norton"?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the significance of the first 13 lines of "East Coker"?

2. What purpose is served by the string of paradoxical statements at the end of Part III of "East Coker"?

3. What is the purpose of the line, repeated and modified throughout the first part of "East Coker," "In my beginning is my end"?

4. What is signified by the phrase in Part III of "East Coker," "the growing terror of nothing to think about"?

5. 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"?

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

7. What is the significance of the "Eructation of unhealthy souls," mentioned in Part III of "Burnt Norton"?

8. What does the speaker mean by commanding, in Part III of "East Coker," that one wait without hoping or loving, and that "the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting"?

9. Why does the speaker claim in Part II of "Burnt Norton" that "To be conscious is not to be in time"?

10. Why is the final sentence of "East Coker" an inversion of the first sentence?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Part III of "The Dry Salvages" begins with a meditation upon the nature of time future. Explicate this meditation in all of its imagery and significance. What images are associated with the future? How does man think of the future? How do these images demonstrate man's thinking of the future? In what way is the future uncertain? In what way is the future predetermined? How do these images demonstrate this? What is the significance of the future to the present? How does man relate the possibilities of the future to the present? In what way does the speaker disdain of this and why? What is the significance of the future, as it is discussed in the poem, to the interpretation of the poems as a whole?

Essay Topic 2

Though explicitly mentioned only once, in Part V of "Burnt Norton," the Word, a conventional Christian signifier for Christ, is a vitally important concept to understanding the whole of The Four Quartets. Through careful exegesis, discuss the way in which the Word is central to the four poems. What is the Word? Why is Christ called the Word? What other significations does the Greek word "logos" have that are associated with Christ as the Word? In what way is this Word unlike all others? What is expressed by the Word? What is the relation of the Word to perfection? How is this Word, as perfection, within the world? What is significant about Its presence in the world? How can this be seen throughout the poem?

Essay Topic 3

One of the recurring themes, but emphasized in "Burnt Norton," throughout The Four Quartets, is the notion of stillness as perfection. Analyze this notion as it is presented throughout the poems, focusing on the non-conventional ways in which stillness is spoken. What is stillness in the conventional sense? In what sense does Eliot speak of it in "Burnt Norton"? How is this different from the conventional sense? What characterizes Eliot's notion of stillness? Why is this notion of stillness a perfection? In what way is it related to movement? With what images and metaphors is it explicated and exposed? What is its overall importance in the poems?

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