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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. To what shall the vortex in "East Coker," Part II, bring the world?
(a) A destructive fire.
(b) A deceitful visage.
(c) A known unknown.
(d) A whispered scream.

2. The first line of Part III of "Burnt Norton" states that "here is a place of" what?
(a) Disaffection.
(b) Consciousness.
(c) Stillness.
(d) Time future.

3. Words and music are said to move, in the fifth part of "Burnt Norton," only in what?
(a) Men's minds.
(b) Truth and falsity.
(c) The wind.
(d) Time.

4. Across what does the light fall, mentioned by the speaker in Part I of "East Coker" after the second time he utters the phrase "In my beginning is my end"?
(a) The gray stones.
(b) The open field.
(c) The village street.
(d) The deep lane.

5. In what way did the speaker, his auditor, and the flowers move in the garden of Part I of "Burnt Norton"?
(a) A haphazard line.
(b) A formal pattern.
(c) A vertical mien.
(d) A lazy stroll.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does the speaker of East Coker parallel with "death" in the final lines of Part I of "East Coker"?

2. The speaker asks, in "Burnt Norton," Part IV, if chill fingers of what "be curled / Down on us"?

3. Into what did the characters of "Burnt Norton"'s first part look towards the end?

4. What does the speaker in the "East Coker"'s fifth part claim becomes stranger as man grows older?

5. Above what do the speaker and his companions move in Part II of "Burnt Norton"?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. 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"?

3. What is meant by the "intolerable wrestled / With words and meanings" in the second part of "East Coker"?

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

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

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

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

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

9. What does the speaker mean in Part II of "Burnt Norton" when he states at the still point of the turning world, "there the dance is, / But neither arrest nor movement"?

10. What does the speaker mean by saying in Part V of "Burnt Norton" that love is caught "in the form of limitation"?

(see the answer keys)

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