There is a nice irony in the fact that the poem we knowas The Ruin is itself in such a state of disrepair. It comes near the end of the Exeter Book, where fire damage has left two sections of it, including the final lines, largely irrecoverable. The poem is a meditation on the remains of a Roman city and is decidedly elegiac in tone, though lacking the first-person viewpoint adopted in other OE elegiac verse. The voice is not apparently that of an actual victim of decay but a detached observer of it. The poem echoes a classical Latin tradition of lament on the fall of great cities and the celebration of their splendours, but there are many precedents for the theme among church writings also. Indeed, although the text (as we have it) is purely descriptive, and specific to a single place, we are bound to see it in the context of overtly didactic poems such as The Wanderer, where the ruin of great buildings is symbolic of the disintegration of the human world in general (see 38/73–9; also 26/80–90). The first twenty lines of The Ruin describe in remarkable detail the decayed state of wondrously made structures which have long outlasted the lives of their boldly creative builders, and we are left with a sense of admiration for the achievements of the past.