The Full Text of “The Relic”
1When my grave is broke up again
2 Some second guest to entertain,
3 (For graves have learn'd that woman-head,
4 To be to more than one a bed)
5 And he that digs it, spies
6A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
7 Will he not let'us alone,
8And think that there a loving couple lies,
9Who thought that this device might be some way
10To make their souls, at the last busy day,
11Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?
12 If this fall in a time, or land,
13 Where mis-devotion doth command,
14 Then he, that digs us up, will bring
15 Us to the bishop, and the king,
16 To make us relics; then
17Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen, and I
18 A something else thereby;
19All women shall adore us, and some men;
20And since at such time miracles are sought,
21I would have that age by this paper taught
22What miracles we harmless lovers wrought.
23 First, we lov'd well and faithfully,
24 Yet knew not what we lov'd, nor why;
25 Difference of sex no more we knew
26 Than our guardian angels do;
27 Coming and going, we
28Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
29 Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals
30Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free;
31These miracles we did, but now alas,
32All measure, and all language, I should pass,
33Should I tell what a miracle she was.
The Full Text of “The Relic”
1When my grave is broke up again
2 Some second guest to entertain,
3 (For graves have learn'd that woman-head,
4 To be to more than one a bed)
5 And he that digs it, spies
6A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
7 Will he not let'us alone,
8And think that there a loving couple lies,
9Who thought that this device might be some way
10To make their souls, at the last busy day,
11Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?
12 If this fall in a time, or land,
13 Where mis-devotion doth command,
14 Then he, that digs us up, will bring
15 Us to the bishop, and the king,
16 To make us relics; then
17Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen, and I
18 A something else thereby;
19All women shall adore us, and some men;
20And since at such time miracles are sought,
21I would have that age by this paper taught
22What miracles we harmless lovers wrought.
23 First, we lov'd well and faithfully,
24 Yet knew not what we lov'd, nor why;
25 Difference of sex no more we knew
26 Than our guardian angels do;
27 Coming and going, we
28Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
29 Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals
30Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free;
31These miracles we did, but now alas,
32All measure, and all language, I should pass,
33Should I tell what a miracle she was.
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“The Relic” Introduction
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"The Relic" is one of John Donne's passionate love songs—and also, oddly, a jab at the Catholic practice of venerating saints' bodies. Imagining a day some years down the line when someone will dig up his grave and find his bones wearing a bracelet of his lover's "bright hair," the poem's speaker sighs that someone will probably try to pass these remains off as the relics of saints. That's a "mis-devotion," he scoffs; what the people of the future should venerate is the miraculous love he and his darling shared. Deep human love, this poem suggests, is plenty sacred on its own. Fittingly enough, this poem wasn't widely published until after Donne's death, when it was collected in the 1633 volume Poems.
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“The Relic” Summary
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When my grave gets dug up so another body can be put in (for graves have learned from women to embrace more than one person) and the gravedigger sees a bracelet made of shining hair around my bony wrist, perhaps he'll leave my and my lady's remains alone. He'll think that this grave holds a loving pair who hoped that keeping parts of their bodies together after death might allow them to meet at this grave on Judgement Day and spend just a little more time together.
If my grave gets dug up in a time or place dominated by flawed religious beliefs, then whoever digs up my bones and that bracelet of hair will take us to the bishop and the king, presenting our remains as the holy bodies of saints. Then you, my love, will be declared Mary Magdalen, and I'll be called—well, whoever Mary Magdalen was meant to have loved, if you get my drift. Women (and a few men) will worship us. If this happens and the people of the future are inclined to make something miraculous of our bodies, I'll leave behind this poem to tell them the real miracles we blameless lovers performed.
First of all, we loved each other truly and faithfully—though so innocently it was almost as if we didn't know what we were doing. We didn't sleep together, so we didn't know that our bodies were different, any more than androgynous angels do. We'd maybe kiss each other when we met and when we said goodbye, but not at any other time. We never touched the private places that nature (though recently held back by the legalities of marriage) liberates. All these miraculous feats, we really did perform—but ah, I'd have to go beyond my limited powers of speech to describe what a miracle my beloved herself was.
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“The Relic” Themes
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The Miraculous, Enduring Power of Love
The speaker of "The Relic" presents love as a kind of miracle—one that has the power to transcend even the grave.
Some years after his death, the speaker imagines, a person who dug up his grave for reuse (a common practice for many centuries in space-poor cities) might be struck by “a bracelet of bright hair about the bone”—that is, a woven hair bracelet around the speaker’s skeletal wrist, a token of a sweet affair between long-dead lovers. Moved by that sign of devotion, such a gravedigger might even take the speaker (and the lady who provided that bright bracelet of hair) for saints. The two of them were no such thing, the speaker scoffs. That doesn't mean, however, that there was nothing miraculous about his love affair with this lady: to him, she was a "miracle" in herself, lovely and lovable beyond words.
More than that, the couple's love has the miraculous power to survive beyond death. That "bracelet of bright hair," the speaker suggests, is a token of a love that will last into eternity: the point of wearing this secular "relic" isn't just to keep a bit of his lady close to him, but to ensure that he and she will meet again on Judgement Day. The idea (based on real Renaissance theology) is that, when everyone rises from the dead, the lady will have to pick up that bit of hair. The couple can then "make a little stay" at the graveside, reunited at last.
For that matter, the couple's love can outwit death by inspiring the speaker to write this very poem! Instructing the people of the future on what real "miracles we harmless lovers wrought," the poem itself is proof that death is not the end of love. Like the saint's relics the poem alludes to, this couple's love is incorruptible: that is, miraculously, it will never decay.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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The Foolishness of Worshipping Relics
Alongside its fervent and sincere declaration of love, "The Relic" finds space to make a few jabs at Catholicism. John Donne, born into a Catholic family, gradually moved away from the tradition of his childhood and became a noted Protestant priest. Here, his speaker hints at the reasons one might do so. One of them is that the Catholic practice of venerating saints' relics (that is, their preserved body parts or possessions) might lend itself to superstition, falsehood, and a strangely irreligious "mis-devotion" to things not worth worshiping.
A person who dug his grave up many years from now, the poem's speaker imagines, might be tempted to present both his skeleton and the love token buried with it (a "bracelet of bright hair" around its wrist) as saints' relics. This, the speaker says, would be untrue—but such misidentifications happen often. There’s a whole procedure to go through to make a relic official, the speaker notes; one must apply to "the bishop, and the king." But that process is apparently, shall we say, less than watertight, and plenty of unholy bones end up being worshiped in gilded reliquaries (special cases).
Even if his body truly were a saint's, the speaker suggests, it would still be a "mis-devotion" to bother honoring it. Here he alludes to a very Protestant suspicion of religious traditions not explicitly laid out in Christian scripture—and a very Protestant worry that worshiping bits of saints might be a distraction from more straightforwardly contemplating God.
In its contemplation of a love worth honoring, then, this poem also ponders how easy it is for "mis-devotion" to take root—and how poorly credulous relic-hunting reflects on those who get caught up in it.
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Spiritual Love vs. Physical Love
John Donne's love poetry often weds sexual passion to religious passion, suggesting that sex can bring lovers close to the divine. In "The Relic," however, Donne takes a different tack. This poem's speaker describes a love so intense that it doesn't need to be expressed physically, suggesting that the deepest love can leap right over the hunger for sex to reach pure spiritual heights.
In the first stanza, the speaker jokes that a grave holding more than one body has learned the trick from women: it's part of "woman-head," femininity, to be willing to "be to more than one a bed." That is: women, in his eyes, are generally promiscuous (a common Renaissance worry that Donne explores at grouchy, paranoid length in many other poems).
That's part of what makes the speaker's love affair so very miraculous. In a world where promiscuous sex is common, the speaker and his love perform the "miracle" of being "harmless lovers," faithfully adoring each other without sex. Their love is utterly sweet and chaste: all they ever do, the speaker says, is kiss, and that sparingly. They might as well be androgynous, sexless "angels," unaware of any "difference of sex" between them.
In this, they're following not the order of "nature" (in which sex just sort of happens), but the "late law," the more recently developed code of sexual ethics that governs when and how sex should occur (e.g., only in marriage). While the speaker sees such tacked-on codes as an "injur[y]" to nature, he also feels that he and his beloved have done each other an honor by refraining from having sex. Perhaps that's in part because they certainly wanted to (it's human nature!), but managed to restrain themselves—and kept on loving each other deeply anyway.
In fact, both the couple's sexual self-restraint and their continued mutual love in spite of that self-restraint suggests that their relationship has reached a transcendent, spiritual height. By looking above and beyond sex, this poem's speaker feels, he and his beloved have performed a romantic miracle.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Relic”
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Lines 1-4
When my grave is broke up again
Some second guest to entertain,
(For graves have learn'd that woman-head,
To be to more than one a bed)“The Relic” begins with a disinterment (that is, the opening of a grave)—or, to be precise, an imagined disinterment. Somewhere down the line, the speaker imagines, somebody will dig up his grave to bury someone else in there.
This idea might sound startling to a modern reader, but to a contemporary of John Donne’s, it would be pretty run-of-the-mill. In a crowded Renaissance-era city, burial space was at a premium; some communities even buried bodies for just long enough to deflesh them, then stacked the resultant dry bones in ossuaries.
In fact, multiple burial was sufficiently ordinary that Donne can make a little joke about it:
(For graves have learn'd that woman-head,
To be to more than one a bed)If graves have learned “woman-head,” womanhood, then they’re like ladies: they’ll always make room in bed for a new person! In this aside, Donne is drawing on a Renaissance idea that (again) might surprise a modern reader: that women are the more promiscuous and lustful of the sexes. (Donne worried about this a decent amount in other poems.)
Considering these macabre and cynical beginnings, readers might be surprised (once again!) to learn that “The Relic” will become a tender love poem. Imagined gravedigging and sexual joking, oddly enough, prepare the way for a tale of chaste love that miraculously transcends death.
If readers spend a moment with the speaker’s little joke now, they might already see the seeds of this richer poem sprouting. The idea that women might “be to more than one a bed,” while certainly a dirty joke, might also be an oddly lovely allusion not to sex but to pregnancy. A woman who sleeps with a man and conceives a child has bedfellows both beside her and inside her.
Read this way, the metaphor hints that the grave might also be a womb, a place of birth. That idea will become important later on in this complex and witty poem, which—like much of Donne’s work—will explore the places where human love touches the divine.
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Lines 5-8
And he that digs it, spies
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
Will he not let'us alone,
And think that there a loving couple lies, -
Lines 9-11
Who thought that this device might be some way
To make their souls, at the last busy day,
Meet at this grave, and make a little stay? -
Lines 12-16
If this fall in a time, or land,
Where mis-devotion doth command,
Then he, that digs us up, will bring
Us to the bishop, and the king,
To make us relics; -
Lines 16-22
then
Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen, and I
A something else thereby;
All women shall adore us, and some men;
And since at such time miracles are sought,
I would have that age by this paper taught
What miracles we harmless lovers wrought. -
Lines 23-30
First, we lov'd well and faithfully,
Yet knew not what we lov'd, nor why;
Difference of sex no more we knew
Than our guardian angels do;
Coming and going, we
Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals
Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free; -
Lines 31-33
These miracles we did, but now alas,
All measure, and all language, I should pass,
Should I tell what a miracle she was.
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“The Relic” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Conceit
“The Relic,” like many of Donne’s poems, uses a central conceit, a governing extended metaphor. Here, relics (the sacred remains of saints) provide that conceit—though no true relics in the traditional sense appear in the poem.
Rather, the speaker imagines that his bones, adorned with his lover’s “bracelet of bright hair,” might someday be misread as saints’ relics, seized on by a gravedigger whose “mis-devotion” (or misguided religious fervor) makes him see saintly bones where there are none.
The conceit enters when the speaker imagines what “relics” worthy of veneration he and his beloved might actually leave behind:
- The obvious one is the “bracelet of bright hair about the bone” in the speaker’s imagined grave: a relic, not of a saint, but of a beautiful and altogether earthly love.
- The other is the poem itself! On this unassuming “paper,” the speaker says, he’s preserving a trace of something truly miraculous—which, after all, is what relics are meant to do.
If the poem is a relic, it’s because it records a sacred love. Perhaps most miraculous of all, the speaker hints, is the fact that though he and his beloved adored each other, they never consummated their love: the most they did was kiss, and that only sparingly. Unusually for Donne's (often passionately sexual) love poetry, this restraint bespeaks a more powerful love, not an incomplete one.
Touchingly, the poem is also a relic of the speaker’s beloved herself—though he admits that his words can’t capture “what a miracle she was.” The poem thus becomes both a relic and a reliquary (that is, a case for a relic): it preserves a miraculous love and a miraculous beloved. Even more intricately, it also preserves a different kind of relic than the one the gravedigger is looking for: that “bright hair,” enduring beyond both lovers’ deaths, just as the speaker imagined it might.
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
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Allusion
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Metaphor
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Alliteration
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Repetition
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"The Relic" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Entertain
- Woman-head
- Let'us
- Device
- The last busy day
- Make a little stay
- Mis-devotion
- Relics
- Mary Magdalen
- A something else thereby
- Sought
- This paper
- Perchance
- Seals
- Injur'd by late law
- Pass
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Host.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Relic”
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Form
"The Relic" is written in a form of Donne's own invention: three stanzas of eleven lines apiece. Those lines vary in length, but follow the same rhythmic pattern stanza to stanza, a mixture of iambic trimeter (lines of three iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "Our hands | ne'er touched | the seals"), iambic tetrameter (four iambs), and iambic pentameter (five iambs).
The resulting shape is as intricate and elegant as the speaker's thought. This form's combination of gusto and rigor suits a poem whose speaker skims effortlessly from the sacredness of love to the excesses of Catholicism.
Donne relished inventing his own complex forms: take a look at "The Triple Fool" or "The Canonization" for more examples of how Donne's intricate verse mirrored an intricate mind.
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Meter
“The Relic” is written in iambs—metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “perchance.” The lines vary between trimeter (three feet), tetrameter (four feet), and pentameter (five feet), in a regular pattern:
- The first four lines of each stanza use tetrameter, as in “Some sec- | ond guest | to en- | tertain.”
- The fifth and seventh lines use trimeter, as in “A some- | thing else | thereby.”
- And the rest of the lines use pentameter, as in “And think | that there | a lov- | ing cou- | ple lies.”
In tandem with the rhyme scheme, this rhythm shapes the poem’s mood and thought:
- The stanzas introduce a theme in regular tetrameter: the digging-up of the speaker's future grave, the "mis-devotion" of those who venerate relics, the chaste love between the speaker and his lady.
- Then, they break into that pattern with short sharp trimeter lines framing a particularly striking pentameter line—the “bracelet of bright hair” in line 6; the tongue-in-cheek idea of the beloved as a false Mary Magdalen in line 17; the droll, sweet image of the lovers sharing hello and goodbye kisses as they’d share breakfast and dinner in line 28.
- The closing stretch of long pentameter lines returns, over and over, to a meditative depiction of the speaker's intense love.
This pattern of meter, in other words, reflects (and shapes!) a pattern of thought.
Iambic meters are flexible, too, easily tweaked for dramatic effect. Listen, for instance, to the rhythm of line 6:
A brace- | let of | bright hair | about | the bone,
Donne shifts stresses around here to illuminate that "bright hair" with a powerful spondee (two stresses in a row, DUM-DUM).
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Rhyme Scheme
Each of the poem's 11-line stanzas uses the same intricate rhyme scheme:
AABB CDDC EEE
Moving from AABB couplets to an enfolding CDDC to that final emphatic EEE, the rhymes follow (and shape) the development of the speaker’s thoughts, dividing each stanza into three movements:
- The AABB couplet section introduces an idea or a scene.
- The CDDC section highlights a particularly vivid image in that scene (like the joke that the relic-hunters of the future will decide that the beloved's hair must have belonged to Mary Magdalen herself).
- The closing EEE section returns to the speaker's passionate devotion to his lady love, its three rhymes in a row mirroring his constant heart.
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“The Relic” Speaker
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The speaker of “The Relic” is a young lover. An educated, clever man, he’s sardonic about the Catholic fondness for venerating body parts (and for occasionally overlooking the evidence about whether those parts actually belonged to the saints they were attributed to).
He’s also passionately and sincerely in love. He’s sure that he’ll go to his grave with his beloved’s hair wound round his wrist. Such a talisman, he hopes, will allow him to reunite with his lover on Judgement Day, when (according to Christian belief) the dead will rise again; wherever the rest of her body is, she’ll have to swing by and pick up her hair, after all.
Leave aside religious relics, this speaker says: he and his beloved have performed a secular “miracle” through their chaste, constant, and virtuous love, devoting themselves fully to each other without exchanging anything more than kisses and hair. For that matter, in his eyes, his lady is herself a miracle beyond words.
In his skepticism about the more macabre aspects of Catholicism, his adoration of his lady love, and his wit, the speaker sounds a lot like the young John Donne himself, and readers have reasonable grounds to interpret this speaker as the poet’s self-portrait.
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“The Relic” Setting
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The only clear physical setting in this poem is the speaker’s imagined grave. But the religious politics here imply that this is a poem of Donne’s own time and place.
Donne was born into a Catholic family during an era when Protestantism was the British state religion. Known Catholics might be persecuted, imprisoned, or killed; Donne’s own brother spent time in jail for hiding a Catholic priest.
Always fervently religious, Donne came to question—and at length reject—the tradition he grew up in. He would become a famous Protestant priest renowned for his eloquent sermons, a major figure in establishment religion, and even a favorite minister of King James’s.
This speaker’s ridicule of “mis-devotion” in the form of credulous relic-hunting marks a phase in Donne’s movement away from Catholic tradition—in particular, his dubiousness over the earthy practice of venerating saints’ body parts (or their supposed body parts, at least).
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Relic”
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Literary Context
John Donne (1572-1631) is remembered as one of the foremost of the "metaphysical poets"—though he never called himself one. The later writer Samuel Johnson coined the term, using it to describe a set of 17th-century English writers who wrote witty, passionate, intricate, cerebral poetry about love and God. George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne were some others.
Donne was the prototypical metaphysical poet: a master of elaborate conceits and complex sentences and a great writer of love poems (like this one) that mingle images of holiness with intense human passion. But during his lifetime, he was mostly a poet in private. In public life, he was an important clergyman, rising to become Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Like the vast majority of his poetry, "The Relic" didn't appear in print until several years after his death in 1633, when his collection Poems was posthumously published.
Donne's mixture of cynicism, passion, and mysticism fell out of literary favor after his 17th-century heyday. Johnson, for instance, a leading figure of the 18th-century Enlightenment, did not mean "metaphysical poet" as a compliment, seeing Donne and his contemporaries as obscure and irrational. But 19th-century Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge were stirred by Donne's mixture of philosophy and emotion, and their enthusiasm slowly resurrected Donne's reputation. Donne is now remembered as one of the most powerful and influential of poets, and he's inspired later writers from T. S. Eliot to Yeats to A. S. Byatt.
Historical Context
This poem's disapproving allusions to the practice of venerating saints' relics draw on a major religious schism in Donne's time: the conflict between Protestants and Catholics.
Donne lived in a time when Protestantism had become Britain's state religion. English Catholics were often persecuted and killed. Donne himself was born into a Catholic family; his own brother went to prison for hiding a priest in his home. (The priest, not so fortunate, was tortured and executed.)
All this violence emerged from the schism between English Catholics and Protestants that began during the reign of Henry VIII, who died about 30 years before Donne was born. Wishing to divorce his first wife and marry a second—unacceptable under Catholicism—Henry split from the Pope and founded his own national Church of England (also known as the Anglican church). This break led to generations of conflict and bloodshed between Anglican Protestants and Catholic loyalists.
Donne himself would eventually renounce Catholicism in order to become an important Anglican clergyman under the patronage of King James I. In this poem as in others, he makes a few jabs at Catholicism's fondness for venerating the body parts of dead saints—and not checking too carefully whose body parts those "relics" actually are.
This poem might also reflect a moment in Donne's love life. In his youth, Donne was a notorious ladies' man with plenty of experience both breaking hearts and having his heart broken. His sometimes foolhardy decision-making around women came to a head in an oddly touching way: when he fell deeply in love with Anne More, an important official's daughter, he eloped with her against her family's wishes. This romantic leap of faith backfired on him when his wife's angry father had him thrown in prison. (Luckily for English literary history, Donne got out and reconciled with his in-laws eventually.)
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More “The Relic” Resources
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External Resources
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A Portrait of Donne — See a portrait of Donne made when he (like this poem's speaker) was a dashing young lover.
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Donne's Poems — See images from the 1633 first edition of Donne's Poems, the posthumous collection in which "The Relic" was first published.
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Donne's Legacy — Read a review of a recent Donne biography that discusses his continuing influence.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Donne's life and work via the British Library.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by John Donne
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