As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs.

These lines occur in John Donne’s elegy “The Funeral,” a poem in which the speaker imagines his own burial and instructs that a bracelet made from his beloved’s hair be buried with him. Donne plays on contemporary funerary customs and anxieties about memorialization: whether the dead are honored by grand monuments or by more intimate tokens. In this setting, the couplet argues that a small, carefully made container (an urn) can hold “great” remains just as well as an expansive grave, undercutting the social prestige attached to elaborate tombs and redirecting attention to the personal relic that will accompany him in death.

Donne’s couplet compresses a memento mori into a pointed comparison: an exquisitely crafted urn can hold “the greatest ashes” just as fittingly as an enormous grave. The line undercuts the vanity of monumental burial and social display, insisting that death levels distinctions of rank and that physical scale is irrelevant to what remains of a person. It also hints at a paradox Donne often exploits: human greatness is finally reduced to ash, yet can be contained in something small, artful, and enduring. The thought aligns with early modern Christian skepticism about worldly pomp and with Donne’s broader preoccupation with mortality and the afterlife.