The Ruin

The poem “The Ruin” evokes the former glory of a ruined city by juxtaposing the grand, lively past state with the decaying present. The poem consists of forty-nine lines describing decayed, broken buildings. The speaker imagines how the towers, walls, baths, and palaces must have looked at the time of their completion and envisions them full of life and action. This imagery is contrasted with the desolate reality of the speaker's time, the buildings having been ruined by time and fate. Where "The Ruin" can be seen from a sentimental perspective, it may also be viewed from an imagistic perspective. Arnold Talentino sees the poem as not a sorrowful lamentation, but as an angry or realistic condemnation of the actual people who wrought the destruction.
The irony of a poem about ruins being found on a burned manuscript page, saying that the burn is "an eloquent image of the theme of mutability with which the poem is concerned" as both describe destruction. William Johnson sees the poem not as a reflection of the physical appearance of the site but rather an evocative effort to bring "stone ruins and human beings into polar relationship as symbolic reflections of each other." Johnson further sees the poem as a metaphor for human existence, a demonstration that all beauty must come to an end. From this perspective, the author of "The Ruin" could be describing the downfall of the Roman Empire by showing its once great and beautiful structure reduced to rubble just as the empire was. Similarly, Alain Renoir points to the author's use of the word "wyrde," meaning "fate," as the reason for the buildings' decay, implying the inevitable transience of man-made things: "that all human splendor, like human beings themselves, is doomed to destruction and
It has most often, though not always, been categorised as an elegy, a poetic genre commonly assigned to a particular group of Old English poems. Many scholars think of the seafarer's narration of his experiences as an exemplum, used to make a moral point and to persuade his hearers of the truth of his words. It has been proposed that this poem demonstrates the fundamental Anglo-Saxon belief that life is shaped by fate. Another understanding was offered in the Cambridge Old English Reader, namely that the poem is essentially concerned to state: "Let us (good Christians, that is) remind ourselves where our true home lies and concentrate on getting there". Scholars have often commented on religion in the structure of The Seafarer. Critics who argue against structural unity specifically perceive newer religious interpolations to a secular poem. Daniel G. Calder argues that the poem is an allegory for the representation of the mind, where the elements of the voyages are objective symbols of an “exilic” state of mind. Contrasted to the setting of the sea is the setting of the land, a state of mind that contains former joys. When the sea and land are joined through the wintry symbols, Calder argues the speaker’s psychological mindset changes. He explains that is when “something informs him that all life on earth is like death. The land the seafarer seeks on this new and outward