My Life’s Dark Hours — Rilke Journal

Book I of Das Stunden-Buch was not written in one sitting, or one year. Rilke came back to the work in three separate bursts — 1899, 1901, 1903 — before Insel published it in Leipzig in 1905. The book you’re looking at is built on the same permission.

“I love my life’s dark hours…”
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours (1905), Book I, poem 6

— Jessie Lemont translation, 1918. Public domain.

Context

The cover stops mid-thought and stays there. That’s the argument of the object: a sentence left open on the outside, and eighty blank pages behind it.

You are not expected to finish it tonight, or well, or in order. The poem it comes from took four years and three attempts, and it was published anyway.

Who It’s For

You’re the one who writes when it’s hard, not only when it’s going well.

• If you’ve ever written the real version of something at an hour you’d never admit to
• If you’ve ever started a notebook, abandoned it for a year, and come back to the same page
• If you’ve ever needed the page more than you needed anyone to read it

Finish the sentence.

The Design

The circle is drawn bigger than the line can fit inside it. I love my begins outside it on the left, life’s dark runs out past it on the right, and the sentence goes straight through the middle rather than sitting politely within. Whatever this is meant to hold, it isn’t holding it.

The mark is an ensō — the Zen circle made in a single breath and deliberately left open at the top — carried in pewter, the one value that crosses cream letters without swallowing them. The line stops early, and the three dots of the ellipsis come down on the ring itself. The cream of the type is the cream of the paper inside.

About This Journal

• Hardcover bound journal
• 80 lined pages, cream stock
• 5.5″ × 8.5″
• Built-in elastic closure
• Ribbon page marker
• Expandable inner pocket

Rainer Maria Rilke, in Plain English

• Lived 1875–1926 — born in Prague, wrote in German, worked across Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland
• Das Stunden-Buch was written in three short bursts — 1899, 1901 and 1903 — and published in Leipzig by Insel Verlag in 1905
• Book I is written in the borrowed voice of a monk, as a sequence of prayers rather than poems with titles
• Letters to a Young Poet — ten letters written between 1903 and 1908 to a young military cadet — was published in 1929 and is still widely read
• Robert Bly’s later English version opens this line “I love the dark hours of my being.” The wording printed here is Jessie Lemont’s, from 1918 — the version in the public domain

More from this collection

• My Life’s Dark Hours — Rilke Phone Case — the same abbreviated line, carried
• My Life’s Dark Hours — Rilke Organic Edition T-Shirt — the full couplet, on organic cotton
• My Life’s Dark Hours — Rilke T-Shirt — the full couplet, standard cotton
• Explore “I live my life in circles” → — the quote page for the line four poems earlier
• The full Rilke collection