In full

The shirt prints the first two lines: I love my life’s dark hours In which my senses quicken and grow deep, The poem continues for six more lines — these are Rilke’s, and they are where the poem goes: While, as from faint incense of faded flowers Or letters old, I magically steep Myself in days gone by: again I give Myself unto the past:—again I live. And flame will sweep in a swift rushing flood Through all the singing currents of my blood. The shirt prints the first two lines. The other six are Rilke’s, and they are where the poem goes.

The journal and the phone case print only the opening — “I love my life’s dark hours…” — because at that size the rest cannot be read. The ellipsis marks exactly what the lines above restore.

About this line

Rilke wrote Book I of Das Stunden-Buch in twenty-five days in the autumn of 1899, in a rented room outside Berlin, in the borrowed voice of a monk — prayers rather than poems, none of them given titles. This is the sixth. 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.