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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. With regards to the past and future, right action is said to be what by the speaker in Part V of "The Dry Salvages"?

2. Describing the correct cohesion of language, the speaker in Part V of "Little Gidding" describes the "common word exact without vulgarity, / The formal word precise but not" what?

3. The speaker says in Part I of "Little Gidding" that there is a "windless cold that is the heart's" what?

4. What is the answer to the question in Part IV of "Little Gidding," "Who then devised the torment"?

5. Whose shine, discussed in Part IV of "The Dry Salvages" "stands on the promontory"?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. With whom does the speaker of Part II of "Little Gidding" converse, and what is their relationship to one another, on the literal level?

3. What is significant about the speaker's discussion of the strangeness of the sea in relation to man, in Part I of "The Dry Salvages"?

4. 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"?

5. What is meant by saying in the final part of "Little Gidding" that "history is a pattern / Of timeless moments"?

6. Explain what is meant by the paradoxical statement in Part V of "The Dry Salvages," "music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all."

7. What is meant in Part III of "Little Gidding" by "We cannot revive old factions / We cannot restore old policies / Or follow an antique drum"?

8. 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"?

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

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"?

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

In Part III of "Burnt Norton," the speaker discusses the "world of perpetual solitude." Examine this discussion in an expository essay. What is solitude? What does it mean for a person to be in solitude? What happens to a person who is continually in solitude? What would a "world of perpetual solitude" be? What sort of conditions afflict the person in such a world of perpetual solitude? How is this significant to the condition of modern man? How is understanding this sort of solitude significant to interpreting "Burnt Norton"? How is it important to interpreting the poem as a whole?

Essay Topic 3

Pat III of "East Coker" is eminently concerned with man's feelings of anxiety in the modern world, particularly as he is left with a sense of being conscious of nothing, or the content of the things of which he is conscious being essentially nothing. Examine this prevalence of anxiety as it is presented in the poem. What is anxiety? What does anxiety do to a person? In the face of what is man made anxious? Why does he have these feelings of anxiety? What does this indicate about the nature of the human person? What does this indicate about the nature of the things with which man regularly occupies himself in the world? How is this significant to the meaning of the poem as a whole? How is it significant to the whole of The Four Quartets?

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