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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 would one feel, displaced from one's room and set in a place of great solitude?
(a) Unparalleled insecurity.
(b) Great bravery.
(c) Great fear.
(d) Abiding love.

2. What word is difficult in translation of Rilke's epitaph because of a pun on the word in the original German?
(a) Niemandes.
(b) Zu.
(c) Lidern.
(d) Widerspruch.

3. Of what does Rilke write is, "to have courage for the most strange, most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter"?
(a) The only courage that is demanded of us.
(b) The singular obstacle in life.
(c) The only feeling we must feel.
(d) The single obstacle in love.

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) Kisses.
(c) Loves.
(d) Deaths.

5. "Woman's Lament II" ends with the line, "and the ________ is not in vain."
(a) Ballerina.
(b) Sparrow.
(c) Butterfly.
(d) Nightingale.

Short Answer Questions

1. In Rilke's one-line poem of the love poems, he writes, "This is the mute-mouthed mounting of the ______."

2. Who does the commentator conclude that Rilke's epitaph addresses?

3. In the poem, "From the Cycle: Nights," Rilke writes, "Night. Oh you in depths ______."

4. In an untitled poem from "Rilke's Poems on Other Difficulties," Rilke writes, "Great star of love's priestesses, which _____ kindles from its own right."

5. What is the title of the poem which begins, "From indescribable transformation flash / such creations--: Feel! and trust!"?

(see the answer key)

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