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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. From what novel is the excerpt "Blood-Remembering" taken?
(a) The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
(b) The Duino Elegies.
(c) Into the Looking Glass.
(d) Letters to a Young Poet.

2. Who does the commentator conclude that Rilke's epitaph addresses?
(a) God.
(b) Pan.
(c) Madonna.
(d) Orpheus.

3. One of the shortest of the love poems consists of the following two lines: "Also to affirm even ______ / like a thing."
(a) Rapture.
(b) Love.
(c) Woman.
(d) Lust.

4. The accompaniment to writing poetry as a subject to Rilke is what?
(a) Love.
(b) Living life.
(c) Dreaming.
(d) Water.

5. Who does Mood quote in the Epilogue with the line, "... tormentor and tormented pedant and dunce wooer and wooed speechless and reafflicted with speech in the dark mud nothing to emend there"?
(a) Samuel Beckett.
(b) Norman O. Brown.
(c) Nietzsche.
(d) Jesus Christ.

Short Answer Questions

1. Mood writes in "The Difficulty of Dying," that Rilke says of lovers, "Being full of life, ... are full of ____."

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

3. What does Rilke suggest we do to the possible dangers at hand in life?

4. From what comes the line, "Murderers are / easily comprehended"?

5. The translator claims that the poems in "Rilke's Poems on Love" deserve to take their place alongside whose great love poems?

(see the answer key)

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