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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. In conjunction with the assertion that the stillness shall be the dancing, the speaker postulates in "East Coker"'s third part that the darkness shall be what?

2. What, in the desert of "Burnt Norton," Part V, is "most attacked by voices of temptation"?

3. In "Burnt Norton," what is daylight said to invest form with in Part III, when it is present?

4. What is the "dignified and commodious sacrament" mentioned in Part I of "East Coker"?

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

Short Essay Questions

1. 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"?

2. What is meant in the lines, "But to what purpose... I do not know," in the first part of "Burnt Norton"?

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

4. Why is it said by the speaker in "Burnt Norton"'s second part that "the enchainment of past and future / Woven in the weakness of the changing body, / Protects mankind from heaven and damnation / Which flesh cannot endure"?

5. What is signified by the speaker's questioning of the deceitfulness of the "quiet-voiced elders" in Part II of "East Coker"?

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

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

8. What is the significance of the dark, mentioned repeatedly at the beginning of Part III of "East Coker," into which "they" all go?

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

10. What does the speaker mean in Part IV of "East Coker" when he states that "Our only health is the disease"?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

In Parts III & IV of "East Coker," the speaker uses a series of paradoxes in order to better illustrate certain truths. In a well-formed and well-planned critical essay, evaluate the use of these paradoxes in conveying meaning. What is a paradox? Of what does a paradox consist? How is a paradox constructed? What is the overall purpose of paradox? How does Eliot use paradox in The Four Quartets? Which paradoxes are the most significant? What do they show about human nature? What do they demonstrate about the human ability to know things? What do they show about the relationship between this world and the next, as it is conceived of in The Four Quartets?

Essay Topic 2

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 3

Part IV of "Little Gidding," a deeply religious section of the poem, uses fire as a metaphor both for suffering and for Love. Discuss this dual signification in a thoughtful analytical essay. How is fire alike to both suffering and to love? In what way is fire torturous? What does physical fire do to a human person? In what ways can it be positive? In what ways negative? What happens to a burnt person? In what way is fire like love? How does love set a person on fire? How are these opposed and yet similar ways of being for fire discussed in Part IV of "Little Gidding"? In what ways are they contrasted? In what ways are they compared? What is meant by the association of fire with a greater sort of Love? How is this significant for the poetical work as a whole?

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