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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 the final lines of "The Dry Salvages," the speaker says that contentment is found at last "If our temporal reversion nourish / (Not too far from the yew-tree) / The life of" what?

2. "Over the asphalt where no other sound was," what does the speaker of Part II of "Little Gidding" hear?

3. What is said to be "heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all," in Part V of "The Dry Salvages"?

4. Near the end of Part I of "Little Gidding," it is said that "the communication / Of the dead is tongued with" what?

5. What, in Part IV of "Little Gidding," "descending breaks the air"?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the significance of the lines in Part II of "The Dry Salvages," "Only the hardly, barely prayable / Prayer of the one Annunciation"?

2. What does the speaker mean when he states, in the last part of "The Dry Salvages," that "Here the impossible union / Of spheres of existence is actual"?

3. 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."

4. What does the speaker mean in Part III of "The Dry Salvages" when he states that, "the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray / Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret"?

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

6. How is "Time the destroyer" also "time the preserver," as stated in Part II of "The Dry Salvages"?

7. What does the speaker mean in Part I of "The Dry Salvages" by "The tolling bell / Measures time not our time"?

8. 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"?

9. 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"?

10. What does the speaker mean by saying in Part I of "Little Gidding" that "prayer is more / Than an order of words, the conscious occupation / Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying"?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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 2

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?

Essay Topic 3

One of the principal themes in the final part of "Burnt Norton" is the relationship between words, music, and pattern and form. Analyze this relationship in a thoroughly developed critical essay. In what does the relationship consist? How is the relationship significant? What are some instances of the way in which the relationship exists? Can any words or music exist without pattern and form? How does form enable words and music to "reach / The stillness"? What does this imply about the nature of pattern and form? What does it reveal about the natures of music and words?

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