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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Rilke writes in "The Dragon-Princess," "We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not _______."
(a) Killing us.
(b) Deadly.
(c) Dangerous.
(d) Against us.

2. Mood writes in the Epilogue, "Perhaps no poet, not even ____, grew poetically as much as Rilke."
(a) Yeats.
(b) Keaton.
(c) Byron.
(d) Shelley.

3. 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."
(a) Annihilate.
(b) Overwhelm.
(c) Intensify.
(d) Dissipate.

4. In his final lines of the Epilogue, Mood writes, "That much would be sufficient--for beginning is perhaps the most ______ thing of all."
(a) Rudimentary.
(b) Significant.
(c) Loving.
(d) Difficult.

5. Unlike the characters in Poe's stories, Rilke writes that we are not what?
(a) Slaves.
(b) Prisoners.
(c) Rats.
(d) Idiots.

6. From what comes the line, "Killing is a form of our wandering mourning"?
(a) The Seven Phallic Poems.
(b) Duino Elegies.
(c) Sonnets to Orpheus.
(d) Letters to a Young Poet.

7. Which poem of Rilke's does Mood refer to in the lines, "And this: that one opens like a lid, / and lying under there nothing but eyelids"?
(a) "The Rose Window."
(b) "Greek Love-Talk."
(c) "The Bowl of Roses."
(d) "The Lovers."

8. In what town is Rilke buried?
(a) Paris.
(b) Raron.
(c) London.
(d) Berlin.

9. In what year did Rilke write his own epitaph?
(a) 1925.
(b) 1927.
(c) 1921.
(d) 1915.

10. In what form is "The Dragon-Princess"?
(a) A poem.
(b) A letter.
(c) A novel.
(d) A short-story.

11. 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.

12. Rilke writes in "The Dragon-Princess," that "fear of the inexplicable has not alone ______ the existence of the individual."
(a) Impoverished.
(b) Blinded.
(c) Drowned.
(d) Killed.

13. 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.

14. What does Mood write is the fallacy of expression theory in art?
(a) That art "expresses feelings."
(b) That art creates feeling.
(c) That art is art for no reason.
(d) That art is full of feeling.

15. In what poems does Rilke refer to the rose as a "body of nothing but radiance"?
(a) The Rose Poems.
(b) Sonnets to Orpheus.
(c) Seven Phallic Poems.
(d) Duino Elegies.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who does Mood quote in the Epilogue as having written, "A social order which draws a distinction between the wish and the deed, between the criminal and the righteous, is this a kingdom of darkness"?

2. What does Mood comment that "Blood-Remembering" answers the aesthetic fallacy of?

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

4. What does Rilke write "that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars"?

5. Mood writes in "The Difficulty of Dying," "the contradiction is a ____ one, that is, it resides in the bloom itself."

(see the answer keys)

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