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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 book of the Bible does Mood quote in the Epilogue?
(a) Luke.
(b) Ecclesiastes.
(c) James.
(d) Matthew.

2. In the poem, "From the Cycle: Nights," Rilke writes, "Night. Oh you in depths ______."
(a) Weeping.
(b) Dissolving.
(c) Emerging.
(d) Sighing.

3. In a very short untitled poem, Rilke writes, "The voices warned me so I _____."
(a) Ran.
(b) Ceased.
(c) Desisted.
(d) Wept.

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

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

Short Answer Questions

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

2. Which poem begins, "See how in their veins all becomes spirit"?

3. Rilke writes in his letters on love, "Once we were ______ in every part, now we are that in one part only."

4. In "Rilke's Poems on Other Difficulties," Rilke writes in one poem from 1924, "We are not to know why / this and that _____ us."

5. Two-thirds of the poems in "Rilke's Poems on Other Difficulties" come from what year?

(see the answer key)

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