Anita Barrows

A FINALIST FOR THE PEN/WEST TRANSLATION AWARD The 100th Anniversary Edition of a global classic, containing beautiful translations along with the original German text. While visiting Russia in his twenties, Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the twentieth century's greatest poets, was moved by a spirituality he encountered there. Inspired, Rilke returned to Germany and put down on paper what he felt were spontaneously received prayers. Rilke's Book of Hours is the invigorating vision of spiritual practice for the secular world, and a work that seems remarkably prescient today, one hundred years after it was written. Rilke's Book of Hours shares with the reader a new kind of intimacy with God, or the divine—a reciprocal relationship between the divine and the ordinary in which God needs us as much as we need God. Rilke influenced generations of writers with his Letters to a Young Poet, and now Rilke's Book of Hours tells us that our role in the world is to love it and thereby love God into being. These fresh translations rendered by Joanna Macy, a mystic and spiritual teacher, and Anita Barrows, a skilled poet, capture Rilke's spirit as no one has done before.

Love Poems to God

Rilke's Book of Hours

Laura Mei

I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood. You, darkness, of whom I am born — I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes all the rest. But the dark embraces everything: shapes and shadows, creatures and me, people, nations — just as they are. It lets me imagine a great presence stirring beside me. You, my own deep soul, trust me. I will not betray you. My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing. What mystery breaks over me now? In its shadow I come into life.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken. I want to free what waits within me so that what no one has dared to wish for may for once spring clear without my contriving. May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back. I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false. I would describe myself like a landscape I’ve studied at length, in detail; like a word I’m coming to understand; like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime; like my mother’s face; like a ship that carried me when the waters raged.

You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness.

No one lives his life. Disguised since childhood, haphazardly assembled from voices and fears and little pleasures, we come of age as masks. Our true face never speaks. Somewhere there must be storehouses where all these lives are laid away like suits of armor or old carriages or clothes hanging limply on the walls. Maybe all paths lead there, to the repository of unlived things. And yet, though we strain against the deadening grip of daily necessity, I sense there is this mystery: All life is being lived. Who is living it, then? Is it the things themselves, or something waiting inside them, like an unplayed melody in a flute?

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I am strange to myself, as though someone unknown 

had poisoned my mother as she carried me.

spill down like strands of loosened hair 

when things and thoughts cannot contain it.

Since I still don't know enough about pain, 

that I may know the weight of your hand, 

Rilke's Book of Hours quotes

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