The book of hours rainer maria rilke pdf download

Edition Notes Other Titles Book of hours. I65 S The Physical Object Pagination p. Community Reviews 0 Feedback? Lists containing this Book poetry from alijtaylor Poetry from Earthsophagus.

Loading Related Books. March 3, November 20, July 27, August 12, Edited by ImportBot. April 1, The three individual books of Rilke's Book of Hours - the Book of Monastic Life, Book of Pilgrimage and Book of Poverty and Death - are reordered here to map back to the medieval Book of Hours format and to progress through the monastic daily hours of prayer - Matins and Lauds from midnight to dawn, Prime, Terce, Sext and None during the daylight hours, Vespers at sunset and Compline at bedtime.

Now substantially revised by Edward Snow, whom Denise Levertov once called "far and away Rilke's best translator," this bilingual edition of The Book of Images contains a number of the great poet's previously untranslated pieces. Also included are several of Rilke's best-loved lyrics, such as "Autumn," "Childhood," "Lament," "Evening," and "Entrance. A bilingual presentation of Rilke's early work illuminates his ideas about God and humanity.

From The Book of Hours in to the Sonnets of Orpheus written in , his poetry explores themes of death, love, and loss. He strives constantly to interrogate the relationship between his art and the world around him, moving from the neo-romantic and the mystic towards the precise craft of expressing the everyday in poetry.

This bilingual edition fully reflects Rilke's poetic development. Up to the time of the publication of these volumes, Rilke's poems possessed a quietude, a stillness suggested in the straight unbroken yet delicate lines of the picture which he portrays and in the soft, almost unpulsating rhythm of his words. The approach of evening or nightfall, the coming of dawn, the change of the seasons, the slow changes of light into darkness and of darkness into light, in short, the most silent yet greatest metamorphoses in the external aspects of nature form the contents of many of these first poems.

The inanimate object and the living creature in nature are not seen in the sharp contours of their isolation; they are viewed and interpreted in the atmosphere that surrounds them, in which they are enwrapped and so densely veiled that the outlines are only dimly visible, be that atmosphere the mystic grey of northern twilight or the dark velvety blue of southern summer nights.

In Advent , the experience of the atmosphere becomes an experience in his innermost soul and, therefore, all things become of value to him only in so far as they partake of the atmosphere, as they are seen in a peculiar air and distance. This first phase in Rilke's work may be defined as the phase of reposeful nature. To this sphere of relaxation and restfulness in which the objects are static and are changed only as the surrounding atmosphere affects them, the second phase in the poet's development adds another element, which later was to grow into dimensions so powerful, so violently breaking beyond the limitations of simple expression in words that it could only find its satisfaction in a dithyrambic hymn to the work of the great plastic artist of our time, to the creations of Auguste Rodin.

This second element is that which the French sculptor in a different medium has carried to perfection. It is the element of gesture, of dramatic movement. This might seem the appropriate place in which to speak of Rilke's monograph on the art of Rodin. To do so would, however, be an undue anticipation, for it will be necessary to trace Rilke's development through several transitions before the value of his contact with the work of Rodin can be fully measured.

The gesture, the movement begins in Advent and Celebration to disturb the stillness prevailing in the first two volumes of poems. Even here it is only gentle and shy at first like the stirring of a breath of wind over a quiet sea; and gentle beings make this first gesture, children and young women at play, singing, dancing or at prayer. Particularly in the cycle Songs of the Maidens in the book Celebration , the atmosphere is condensed and becomes the psychic background of the landscape against which the gesture of longing or expectation is seen and felt.

It is the impatience to burst into blossoming, the longing for love which pulsates in these Songs of the Maidens with the tenseness of suspense. The Prayers of the Maidens to Mary have not the mild melody of maidenly prayer; they vibrate with the ecstasy of expectant life, and the Madonna is more than the Heavenly Virgin, their longing transforms her into the symbol of earthly love and motherhood.

This expectation, in spite of its intensity, is subdued and is only heard like the cadence of a far off dream:. Mention should be made of some prose writings which Rilke published in the year and shortly afterward. With both beauty of detail and problematic interest, the short stories show an incoherence of treatment and a lack of dramatic co-ordination easily conceivable in a poet who is essentially lyrical and who at that time had not mastered the means of technique to give to his characters the clear chiselling of the epic form.

Dostoievsky, whom Merejkovsky describes somewhere as the man with the never-young face, the face "with its shadows of suffering and its wrinkles of sunken-in cheeks The poor, the outcasts, the homeless ones received for him a new significance, the significance of the isolated figure placed in the mighty everchanging current of a life in which this figure stands strong and solitary.

In the poem entitled Pont Du Carrousel , written in Paris a few years later, Rilke has visioned the blind beggar aloof amid the fluctuating crowds of the metropolis. Of Russia and its influence upon him, Rilke writes: "Russia became for me the reality and the deep daily realization that reality is something that comes infinitely slowly to those who have patience.

Russia is the country where men are solitary, each one with a world within himself, each one profound in his humbleness and without fear of humiliating himself, and because of that truly pious.

Here the words of men are only fragile bridges above their real life. In the first decade of the new century Rilke reached the height of his art and with a few exceptions the poems represented in this volume are selected from the poems which were published between the years and The ascent toward the acme of Rilke's art after the year is as rapid as it is precipitous.

Only a few years previous we read in Advent:. And these are wishes: gentle dialogues Of the poor hours with eternity. With Das Buch der Bilder the dream is ended, the veil of mist is lifted and before us are revealed pictures and images that rise before our eyes in clear colourful contours. Whether the poet conjures from the depths of myth The Kings in Legends , or whether we read from The Chronicle of a Monk the awe-inspiring description of The Last Judgment Day , or whether in Paris on a Palm Sunday we see The Maidens at Confirmation , the pictures presented stand out with the clearness and finality of the typical.

It is a significant fact that Rilke dedicated this book to Gerhart Hauptmann, "in love and gratitude for his Michael Kramer. In The Book of Pictures , Rilke's art reaches its culmination on what might be termed its monumental side. The visualization is elevated to the impersonal objective level which gives to the rhythm of these poems an imperturbable calm, to the figures presented a monumental erectness.

The Men of the House of Colonna , The Czars , Charles XII Riding Through the Ukraine are portrayed each with his individual historical gesture, with a luminosity as strong as the colour and movement which they gave to their time. In the mythical poem, Kings in Legends , this concrete element in the art of Rilke has found perhaps its supreme expression:.

They blind all with their gleam, Their loins encircled are by girdles bright, Their robes are edged with bands Of precious stones—the rarest earth affords— With richly jeweled hands They hold their slender, shining, naked swords. There are in The Book of Pictures poems in which this will to concentrate a mood into its essence and finality is applied to purely lyrical poems as in Initiation , that stands out in this volume like "the great dark tree" itself so immeasurable is the straight line of its aspiration reaching into the far distant silence of the night; or as in the poem entitled Autumn , with its melancholy mood of gentle descent in all nature.

In The Book of Hours , Rilke withdraws from the world not from weariness but weighed down under the manifold conflicting visions. As the prophet who would bring to the world a great possession must go forth into the desert to be alone until the kingdom comes to him from within, so the poet must leave the world in order to gain the deeper understanding, to be face to face with God. The mood of Das Stunden-Buch is this mood of being face to face with God; it elevates these poems to prayer, profound prayer of doubt and despair, exalted prayer of reconciliation and triumph.

The Book of Hours contains three parts written at different periods in the poet's life: The Book of a Monk's Life ; The Book of Pilgrimage , and The Book of Poverty and Death , although the entire volume was not published until several years later.

The Book of Hours glows with a mystic fervour to know God, to be near him. In this desire to approach the Nameless One, the young Brother in The Book of a Monk's Life builds up about God parables, images and legends reminiscent of those of the 17th century Angelus Silesius, but sustained by a more pregnant language because exalted by a more ardent visionary force.

The motif of The Monk's Life is expressed in the poem beginning with the lines:. Through the grey cell of the young Monk there flash in luminous magnificence the colours of the great renaissance masters, for he feels in Titian, in Michelangelo, in Raphael the same fervour that animates him; they, too, are worshippers of the same God. There are poems in The Book of Pilgrimage of the stillness of a whispered prayer in a great Cathedral and there are others that carry in their exultation the music of mighty hymns.

The visions in this second book are no less ecstatic though less glowingly colourful; they have withdrawn inward and have brought a great peace and a great faith as in the poem of God, whose very manifestation is the quietude and hush of a silent world:.

And when the day with drowsy gesture bends And sinks to sleep beneath the evening skies, As from each roof a tower of smoke ascends So does Thy Realm, my God, around me rise.

The last part of The Book of Hours , The Book of Poverty and Death , is finally a symphony of variations on the two great symbolic themes in the work of Rilke. As Christ in the parable of the rich young man demands the abandonment of all treasures, so in this book the poet sees the coming of the Kingdom, the fulfilment of all our longings for a nearness to God when we have become simple again like little children and poor in possessions like God Himself.

In this phase of Rilke's development, the principle of renunciation constitutes a certain negative element in his philosophy. The poet later proceeded to a positive acquiescence toward man's possessions, at least those acquired or created in the domain of art.

In our approach through the mystic we touch reality most deeply. It is because of this that all art and all philosophy culminate in their final forms in a crystallization of those values of life that remain forever inexplicable to pure reason; they become religious in the simple, profound sense of that word. Before the eternal facts of Life doubt and strife are reconciled into faith, will and pride change into humility. The realization of this truth expressed in the medium of poetry is the significance of Rilke's Book of Hours.

A distinguished Scandinavian writer has pronounced Das Stunden-Buch one of the supreme literary achievements of our time and its deepest and most beautiful book of prayer. In his subsequent poetic work Rilke did not again reach the sustained high quality of this book, the mood and idea of which he incorporated into a prose work of exquisite lyrical beauty: The Sketch of Malte Laurids Brigge.

In New Poems and New Poems, Second Part the historical figure, frequently taken from the Old Testament, has grown beyond the proportions of life; it is weightier with fate and invariably becomes the means of expressing symbolically an abstract thought or a great human destiny. Abishag presents the contrast between the dawning and the fading life; David Singing Before Saul shows the impatience of awakening ambition, and Joshua is the man who forces even God to do his will.

The spirit of the Middle Ages with its religious fervour and superstitious fanaticism is symbolized in several poems, the most important among which are The Cathedral , God in the Middle Ages , Saint Sebastian personifying martyrdom, and The Rose Window , whose glowing magic is compared to the hypnotic power of the tiger's eye. Modern Paris is often the background of the New Poems , and the crass play of light and shadow upon the waxen masks of Life's disillusioned in the Morgue is caught with the same intense realistic vision as the flamingos and parrots spreading their vari-coloured soft plumage in the warmth of the sun in the Avenue of the Jardin des Plantes.

Almost all of the poems in these two volumes are short and precise. The images are portrayed with the sensitive intensity of impressionistic technique. The majestic quietude of the long lines of The Book of Pictures is broken, the colours are more vibrant, more scintillating and the pictures are painted in nervous, darting strokes as though to convey the manner in which they were perceived: in one single, all-absorbing glance.

For this reason many of these New Poems are not quite free from a certain element of virtuosity. On the other hand, Rilke achieves at times a perfect surety of rapid stroke as in the poem The Spanish Dancer , who rises luminously on the horizon of our inner vision like a circling element of fire, flaming and blinding in the momentum of her movements.

Degas and Zuloaga seem to have combined their art on one canvas to give to this dancer the abundant elasticity of grace and the splendid fantasy of colour. Many of the themes in the New Poems bear testimony to the fact that Rilke travelled extensively, prior to the writing of these volumes, in Italy, Germany, France, and Scandinavia. His book on the five painters at the artists' colony at Worpswede, where he remained for a time, entirely given over to the observation of the atmosphere, the movement of the sky and the play of light upon the far heath of this northern landscape, is an introduction to every interpretation of the work of landscape painters and a tender poem to a land whose solitary and melancholy beauty entered into his own work.

More vital than the influence of the personalities and the art treasures of the countries which Rilke visited and more potent in its effect upon his creations, like a great sun over the most fruitful years of his life, stands the towering personality of Auguste Rodin.

The New Poems bear the dedication: "A mon grand ami, Auguste Rodin," indicating the twofold influence which the French sculptor wielded over the poet, that of a friend and that of an artist. One recalls the broad, solidly-built figure of Rodin with his rugged features and high, finely chiselled forehead, moving slowly among the white glistening marble busts and statues as a giant in an old legend moves among the rocks and mountains of his realm, patient, all-enduring, the man who has mastered life, strong and tempered by the storms of time.

And one thinks of Rainer Maria Rilke, young, blond, with his slender aristocratic figure, the slightly bent-forward figure of one who on solitary walks meditates much and intensely, with his sensitive full mouth and the "firm structure of the eyebrow gladly sunk in the shadow of contemplation," the face full of dreams and with an expression of listening to some distant music.

From no other book of his, not excepting The Book of Hours , can we deduce so accurate a conception of Rilke's philosophy of Life and Art as we can draw from his comparatively short monograph on Auguste Rodin. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! At the beginning of this century, a young German poet returned from a journey to Russia, where he had immersed himself in the spirituality he discovered there. He "received" a series of poems about which he did not speak for a long time - he considered them sacred, and different from anything else he ever had done and ever would do again.