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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

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

2. What does Rilke write in his first letter, imploring the reader to try to love?
(a) Dignity.
(b) The answers.
(c) The questions themselves.
(d) The truth.

3. In which poem does Rilke begin, "She who sleeps... To be so very awake, / near pure waking, that we into sleepers grow"?
(a) "The Lovers."
(b) "Magic."
(c) "Greek Love-Talk."
(d) "Music."

4. What book of Simone de Beauvoir's does the commentator say led him to "militant feminism" in the Introduction to "Rilke's Letters on Love"?
(a) Letters to a Young Poet.
(b) The Woman's Life.
(c) The Feminist Manifesto.
(d) The Second Sex.

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

Short Answer Questions

1. Who is one of the earliest figures of feminism who was friends with Rilke?

2. One poem, using nature imagery, reads, "Cheerful gift from the chillier / mountains / attempts to leap into ____."

3. In what year did Rilke write the "Woman's Lament" poems?

4. In Part IV of "The Seven Phallic Poems," the poet writes, "You don't know ______, with your diffidence."

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

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Mood say regarding Rilke's sensuality in the introduction to his poems?

2. What does Rilke write of using the metaphor of water, song, and play in his untitled poems?

3. What does Rilke write of "silence" in his untitled poems?

4. What does Rilke say regarding the young and marriage in his letters?

5. What is the subject and imagery in the poem "Magic"?

6. What references to Venus does Rilke make in the untitled poems of "Poems of Other Difficulties"?

7. What does Rilke say of questions and answers in his first essay?

8. What are the subjects discussed in the "Woman's Lament" poems?

9. What does Rilke say regarding the institute of marriage and solitude?

10. How does Rilke suggest sexuality should be regarded in terms of innocence? What does he say of children?

(see the answer keys)

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