Hours in the Garden and Other Poems: A Bilingual Edition

During the decade when Hermann Hesse was working on his great novel The Glass Bead Game, he was also writing poetry that would reflect the book’s themes of mysticism and the search for perfection. Hours in the Garden and Other Poems contains a selection of this verse. Although not written as a set, together these poems elucidate Hesse’s physical and metaphysical search for what he described as “a sublime alchemy, an approach to the spirit that is unified in itself beyond all images.”