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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Rilke writes, as the first lines of "Blood-Remembering," "Ah! but verses amount to so little when one writes them _____."
(a) Through dreams.
(b) Young.
(c) Blind.
(d) Old.

2. What literary technique is used in the following? "lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities"?
(a) Metaphor.
(b) Simile.
(c) Assonance.
(d) Irony.

3. What "gesture" must one know in order to write?
(a) Of the seas.
(b) With which the flowers open.
(c) Of the rivers running.
(d) Of the music.

4. Rilke's letters are examples of what?
(a) Irony.
(b) Verisimilitude.
(c) Prose.
(d) Verse.

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

Short Answer Questions

1. Rilke writes in "Blood-Remembering" that quite at the end of life, one might be able to write how many verses that were good?

2. The commentator remarks in the Introduction, "It should be emphasized that Rilke's language is thoroughly _______."

3. What does Rilke comment in the excerpt from the Introduction that Eros "cannot be"?

4. 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?

5. In the Prologue, who does the commentator say is the other of the two greatest writers of the twentieth century?

(see the answer key)

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