RILKE'S TITLE THE BOOK OF HOURS SUGGESTS a collection of personal devotions such as used to be written for private use in worship. That this is a volume of “religious” poetry seems self-evident. Yet Rilke's God is not, or not only, the biblical God: He is creature as much as creator, the physical embodiment of extreme human weakness and need. In order to take on this vulnerability, which enriches and completes Him, God is dependent on humanity. In The Book of Hours Rilke accordingly conceives himself, through the personae of monk, painter, and pilgrim, as one of those to whom it is given to picture and fashion God in humanity's own vulnerable image.

Yet this does not simply mean revealing God in the traditional devotional sense. Rilke's monk seeks rather to conceal God, hiding Him behind the icons he paints in order to allow Him to continue slowly developing, slowly becoming (to use a key term). The complex music of The Book of Hours can be seen as a lattice-work through which Rilke encourages his God to grow: in the rhymes, in the rhythms, in the interstices between the poems. This, we will see, places a particular emphasis on the role of the translator, since the artist-monk is in a sense already a translator himself, seeking to transform the divine into human language.

The Book of Hours thus offers more than mere piety. The individual poems of the sequence are not only a technical tour de force, impassioned and mystical, but are also extensively varied in voice, style, length, and theme.