The Book of Hours

The Book of Hours (German: Das Stunden-Buch) is a collection of poetry by the Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). The collection was written between 1899 and 1903 in three parts, and first published in Leipzig by Insel Verlag in April 1905. With its dreamy, melodic expression and neo-Romantic mood, it stands, along with The Lay of the Love and Death of Christoph Cornet, as the most important of his early works.

The work, dedicated to Lou Andreas-Salome, is his first through-composed cycle, which established his reputation as a religious poet, culminating in the poet's Duino Elegies.^[1] In provocative language, using a turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau aesthetic, Rilke displayed a wide range of his poetic talent. The suggestive musicality of his verses developed into the hallmark of his later lyric poetry, to mixed criticism.^[2]

The Book of Hours consists of three sections with common themes relating to St. Francis and the Christian search for God.^[3] The sections are as follows:

• The Book of Monastic Life (Das Buch vom mönchischen Leben)
• The Book of Pilgrimage (Das Buch von der Pilgerschaft)
• The Book of Poverty and Death (Das Buch von der Armut und vom Tode)

One of Rilke's translators, Edward Snow, said the work "is one of the strongest inaugural works in all of modern poetry. It arrives as if out of nowhere and seems to want to wipe the slate clean."^[4]