Analyzing The Poem 'The Ruin'

The poem, The Ruin, is an elegy about a fallen city. The author says at the beginning of the poem, “snapped rooftrees, towers fallen, / the works of the Giants, the stonesmiths, / mouldereth” (3-5), to describe the scene of the fallen city. The author says that everything, that was once a beautiful sight, has turned to dust and rubble. The architects that built the beautiful sight are now under the ground and their work has fallen to the ground as well. The author also mentions, “and the wielders and wrights? / Earthgrip holds them- gone, long gone, / Fast in gravesgrasp while fifty fathers / and sons have passed” (10-13), because the people who used to thrive in that area and built the city are now gone and no one is left. Everyone is dead.

The Wanderer is about a man who feels isolated and thinks back to the way things were in the past. The Wanderer is considered an ubi sunt because the main character longs for the way things used to be. This poem can relate the elegy The Ruin, because in this poem, the city and buildings are vacant and desolate. The author looks back at how the mead hall was raging with noise and people and now looks at the fallen buildings and ruins of what once was a city. A quote in The Wanderer that relates the two poems very well is, “old walls stand, tugged at by winds / and hung with hoar- frost, buildings in decay. / The wine halls crumble, lords lie dead” (76-78). In The Wanderer, as well as The Ruin, Things are crumbled and the joyful place they once were are now gone forever. Both poems reminisce on how things used to be. In The Ruin, the author says, “bright were the buildings, halls where springs ran, / high, horn gabled, much throng noise; / these many mead-halls men filled / with laughter and cheerfulness: weird changed that” (24-27). By this, he means that before all of the buildings were crumbled and decayed, they used to be filled with life and laughter by the people who inhabited