The master theme of "The Ruins of Rome" had already suggested itself to Dyer in his earlier "Written at Ocriculum in Italy, 1725". Written in a mannered imitation of Miltonic blank verse, it opens with Dyer painting among the ruins, "studious to excel, of praise and fame ambitious". As night falls, a seer comes to remind him of his mortality by pointing to the downfallen architecture of the past. Instead he is exhorted to learn from the work of the eternal Creator spread in beauty across the skies and dedicate his life to goodness. The poem's religious conclusions were also to find expression in two unpublished poems of the 1750s, "A Night Prospect written on Lincoln Heath" and "On the Destruction of Lisbon".