[1] In it the poet, considering a ruined house and remembering the love-affair he once conducted there, reflects on the transience of all worldly pleasures.
[15] "The Ruin" is pervaded by a sense of desolation, of the transitoriness and mutability of this world's pleasures, and in particular of the love of women when it is based on physical rather than spiritual attraction.
[16][17] It might be seen as ending with an expression of nostalgia for an existence that now belongs to the irretrievable past,[18] or alternatively with "a conviction that what was good remains so".
[22][20] Dafydd described Morfudd as tall, blonde, and well-born, as having religious objections to returning his love, and as eventually being married off by her family to another man.
[23] The theme of contemptus mundi, contempt for all that the secular world can offer, is a very common one, not only in Dafydd's other works but in all medieval literature that draws on the teaching of the Church.