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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through The Dragon-Princess.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. In "The Dragon-Princess," Rilke suggests that we hold our life to the most difficult, and that which now "still seems to us the most alien will become" what?
(a) What blinds us.
(b) What kills us.
(c) What we most trust.
(d) What frees us.

2. The commentator notes that all of the poems in "Rilke's Poems on Love" were written when he was how old?
(a) His twenties.
(b) His fifties.
(c) His thirties and forties.
(d) His forties and fifties.

3. In "The Seven Phallic Poems," who "grasps suddenly the bull bud of his vitality"?
(a) The maiden.
(b) The soldier.
(c) The gardener.
(d) The rose-gatherer.

4. In one untitled poem of "Rilke's Poems on Other Difficulties," Rilke writes, "Play the ____, the single ones, quickly and you..."
(a) Harps.
(b) Loves.
(c) Deaths.
(d) Kisses.

5. In the seventh of "The Seven Phallic Poems," what does the poet write that his "semen climbs gladly like"?
(a) A tree.
(b) A tower.
(c) A child.
(d) A god.

Short Answer Questions

1. From what language has the author translated the poems and prose excerpts of "Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties"?

2. In "The Dragon-Princess," Rilke writes that the feeling one might have placed in total isolation, is "an abandonment to something inexpressible would almost ______ him."

3. What shall we "indeed turn" upon recognizing our solitude in "The Dragon-Princess"?

4. Over what does the poet write, "we will together contend" in "Greek Love-Talk"?

5. Of what does Rilke write is, "to have courage for the most strange, most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter"?

(see the answer key)

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