Symbols of endurance as much as transience, these remnants of another age open on to a great variety of themes. Please share what you can build from the shards of history
As the latest Greek drama has unfolded night after night on our TV screens, it has been interesting to see broadcasters using backdrop images of the Acropolis of Athens as a visual shorthand for an entire country. It has been a powerful reminder of the symbolic power of ruined buildings, and their ability to simultaneously represent both the fragility and the endurance of the civilisations that built them in the first instance. It is also, as it happens, the subject of a fine poem by Lawrence Durrell.
The ruin as subject matter entered English poetry early, with the great Anglo-Saxon poem preserved in the Exeter Book of that name. The Ruin covers many of the tropes used in poems about ruins ever since: wonder at the skill of those who built the place; speculation as to why it fell into disrepair; a meditation (tacit or implicit) on our own inadequacy in comparison to the builders; a general sense of mortality wrapped up in more than a hint of nostalgia. It is, in some senses, deeply appropriate that the manuscript is, itself, somewhat ruined, thereby forcing the reader to imagine the missing sections, just as we do when contemplating an actual ruin.
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