ALTHOUGH FIRST PUBLISHED as a complete cycle in late 1905, The Book of Hours was begun in 1899. Rilke wrote the first part (The Book of Monkish Life) in about three weeks of that year and the second and third books in 1901 and 1903, each of these in about a week.

Each book has its own character and springs from a different episode of Rilke's life: travel to Italy and then, most importantly, to Moscow and St Petersburg (first book), a period of living with wife and child in the North German artists' communities of Worpswede and Westerwede (second book), and the transition to the urban modernity of Paris (third book). Rilke's concept of God develops through the course of the sequence: from a Florentine God “in a glory of fire” to an ascetic Russian “God of becoming”; from a mentor deity who accompanies him out into the plains of experience, to a God who appears cruelly to condemn him to live among the privations of the urban poor — but who then reveals Himself precisely as the guarantor of the weak and poverty-stricken. Accompanying this spiritual journey is an aesthetic, art-historical narrative: Rilke rejects Renaissance magnificence in favour of the northern, peasant simplicity that he sees in, respectively, Russian iconography, the North German landscape, and the modern city life of Paris.

At the end of the third book a visionary gilding is cast across the dark scenes of deprivation through the figure of St Francis, humble “brother of the nightingales,” who symbolically draws together the themes of monkish life, pilgrimage and poverty, reclaiming urban degradation as a necessary humility.