Poems from the Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Babette Deutsch, 16 pages
A short selection of poems taken from Rilke's Das Stundenbuch, written between 1899 and 1903, Poems from the Book of Hours presents a set of love songs to God. The God of Rilke does not dwell in unapproachable mystery, but is almost pantheistically omnipresent, warmly immanent and personal, filling and enlivening all things. Above all, He is the God of artistic inspiration, incarnate in the beauty of human work, and thus paradoxically dependent and vulnerable. If, indeed, the transcendent can be made aesthetically immanent, it is in the poems of Rilke.
In German with the English translation on facing pages.
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