“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.