"Beware of Ruins" consists of four six-lined stanzas, each with a rhyme scheme of abcabc. The meter is a fairly regular iambic pentameter except for the fourth line in every stanza which is a ragged iambic tetrameter. This is a conversational meter (iambs describing the usual topography of spoken English), as if the narrator is casually giving advice to his readers as we walk with him around the ruins. There is only one near rhyme: "place" with "alas," what appears to be this poem's acceptable flaw. Iambs are sometimes accompanied by other patterns. For example, lines 1, 14, 19, and 20:

Beware of ruins: they have a treacherous charm Monstrous assumptions on the unburied past There are ruins too of a less obvious kind I go back cannot believe my eyes the place

These occasional trochees, anapests, dactyls, pyrrhics, and amphibrachs give the lines variation and interest, keep them from sounding too...