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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 in Part V of "Four Quartets: Burnt Norton" is said to be "itself unmoving, / Only the cause and end of movement"?

2. At what door might the speaker of "Eyes that last I saw in tears" see the eyes again?

3. Whom does the poet shall "try" man's well-preserved complacency in the third of the "Five Finger Exercises"?

4. How many male voices speak in the third chorus of 'The Rock'?

5. What number does the speaker of "The Cultivation of Christmas Trees" ascribe to the last Christmas?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. What is a possible interpretation of the significance of the "Midwinter spring" described in Part I of "Little Gidding"?

4. What is implied about the owner of the eyes about whom the speaker is talking in "Eyes that last I saw in tears"?

5. What does Sweeney primarily describe in the "Fragment of an Agon"?

6. What are the women doing with the card game in the "Fragment of a Prologue"?

7. About what is the speaker confused in "The wind sprang up at four o'clock"?

8. For what is the ship in "Marina" a symbolic signifier?

9. How is the "Mr. Eliot" of the "Five-Finger Exercises" satirized?

10. What is the "conscious art practiced with natural ease" of which Eliot writes in "To Walter de la Mare"?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

As one of Eliot's more controversial poems, "The Hippopotamus" is a commentary on religious belief and religious practice. Analyze and provide your own interpretation of this poem. What is the overall meaning of the poem? What are the individual parts which indicate this meaning? For what does the Hippopotamus within the poem stand? What is significant about the Hippopotamus' analogous portrayal? What is significant about the Church being referred to as the "True Church"? What is meant by the "old miasmal mist"?

Essay Topic 2

His first major poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", is a commentary on the modern world and in particular on the modern man. Provide your own interpretation of this poem in an analytically interpretive essay. Who is Prufrock? What is Prufrock's status in society? What troubles the mind, thoughts, and desires of Prufrock? What characterizes Prufrock as a whole? How is Prufrock a symbol of modernity?

Essay Topic 3

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?

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