“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.