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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through The Difficulty of Dying: Rilke's Self-Composed Epitaph.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Rilke accuse of vilifying sensuality and love?
(a) Womankind.
(b) The government.
(c) Christianity.
(d) Mankind.

2. What does Rilke refer to death as?
(a) The lover's quarrel.
(b) The killer of children.
(c) The other side of life.
(d) The sleeping beast.

3. In "Rilke's Poems on Other Difficulties," Rilke writes in one poem from 1924, "We are not to know why / this and that _____ us."
(a) Empowers.
(b) Strengthens.
(c) Masters.
(d) Weakens.

4. What does the translator comment in the Prologue that his translations of Rilke are?
(a) Inadequate.
(b) Eloquent.
(c) Beautiful.
(d) Exact.

5. Rilke says in "The Dragon-Princess," that "the experiences called 'visions,' the whole so-called 'spirit world'," etc. has been so crowded out of life that the "sense we could have grasped them with has" done what?
(a) Collapsed.
(b) Atrophied.
(c) Diminished.
(d) Melted.

Short Answer Questions

1. On what word does Mood focus in examining the ambiguity of "The Dragon-Princess"?

2. What does Rilke write "that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars"?

3. Of the book, Mood writes in the Epilogue, "My work here, then, is only a ______, as I indicated in the Prologue."

4. Rilke writes in "The Dragon-Princess," that "fear of the inexplicable has not alone ______ the existence of the individual."

5. The commentator regards that Rilke's "justly famed deep spirituality" is rooted essentially in what?

(see the answer key)

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