 Throughout the Duino Elegies , Rilke explores themes of " the limitations and insufficiency of the human condition and fractured human consciousness ... mankind 's loneliness , the perfection of the angels , life and death , love and lovers , and the task of the poet . " Philosopher Martin Heidegger remarked that " the long way leading to the poetry is itself one that inquires poetically , " and that Rilke " comes to realize the destitution of the time more clearly . The time remains destitute not only because God is dead , but because mortals are hardly aware and capable even of their own mortality . " Rilke explores the nature of mankind 's contact with beauty , and its transience , noting that humanity is forever only getting a brief , momentary glimpse of an inconceivable beauty and that it is terrifying . At the onset of the First Elegy , Rilke describes this frightened experience , defining beauty as 
