“I love my life’s dark hours in which my senses quicken and grow deep,”
This line comes on
About this line
Rilke wrote Book I of Das Stunden-Buch in twenty-five days in the autumn of 1899, in Schmargendorf, then a village outside Berlin, in the borrowed voice of a monk — prayers rather than poems, none of them given titles. This is the fifth. The hours it praises are not hard hours. They are the ones where your own day comes back to you the way scent comes off dried flowers, or a sentence comes off a letter you haven’t opened in years: far enough away that you can finally read it. What the poem does with that distance is refuse to call it loss. Insel published the book in Leipzig in 1905, six years after it was written.
Why we carry this line
I love the dark — the moon, the planets, night launches. I’m a nighttime devotee; some former life as a vampire, probably. Others will read this as the hard hours instead, and that’s fair. However you come at the line, it belongs.
The design
The mark reads two ways at once. It’s an ensō, the Zen circle drawn in a single breath and left open on purpose. It’s also a moon, heavier along one edge and thinning along the other.
It’s printed in pewter, soft enough that the words crossing into it still read. Nothing fills the circle, so the fabric shows through.
On the phone case and the journal, the line stops at “dark hours…” The full couplet won’t fit at that size.
Documented source
Every quote here is traced to a documented source. How we verify →