Rilke's Stunden-Buch (Book of Hours) reflects his negotiation with the crisis of belief in a secular age. While Rilke shared Nietzsche's conclusion that belief in God was no longer tenable in a modern age, his poetic experimentation led time and again to the representation of God and other transcendent figures, notably angels. This paper examines the prayer-poems of Rilke's Stunden-Buch, voiced from the perspective of a fictional Russian monk and iconographer whose intimacy with an unknowable God becomes a means of exploring transformations of the soul in the conditions of modernity and the secular city. The paper argues that Rilke reimagines prayer as a secular instrument for grappling with human consciousness and its relation to an external world. The Stunden-Buch exemplifies a movement in early 20th-century Europe whereby poetry became the last refuge for a vanquished transcendence and its corresponding modes of interiority.