Most funeral poems look on from the mourners' side. Donne's speaker imagines his own funeral from inside the coffin, and he is already giving orders. Whoever prepares his body must not "harm" or "question much" a "subtle wreath of hair" circling his arm, a keepsake that, as the poem goes on, clearly comes from a woman he loved. From this small object Donne builds an argument about soul and body, and about what unreturned love costs. It ends with a twist that changes how the whole scene reads.
The first stanza is playful and strange. The hair, the speaker claims, is his "outward Soul," a "Viceroy" left in charge when the true soul departs for heaven. The body turns into an empire, with the limbs as "her Provinces," and the hair is a governor sent to stop the territory from collapsing. This political vocabulary gives a lock of hair the weight of imperial authority, and the solemnity is faintly comic. That mix of grandeur and wit is very much Donne's manner. The final line, "And keep these limbs, her Provinces, from dissolution," is the longest in the stanza, and the four-syllable last word stretches it out until it seems to come apart as we say it.
The second stanza turns to anatomy. The "sinewy thread my brain lets fall / Through every part" is the nervous system, which ties the body into "one of all." If that can hold a person together, the speaker reasons, hair can do it better, since it has "strength and art" from "a better brain," hers. A small detail sharpens the contrast. His threads "let fall" downward from his brain, while her hairs "upward grew." Then the mood darkens. Perhaps, he says, she meant him to "know my pain," because the bracelet works like the manacles put on "prisoners... when they're condemned to die." The line ends on a hanging "I," as if he hesitates to say the thought, and the last line is made almost entirely of heavy one-syllable words that plod like a chain. The same object is both a sacred guardian and a shackle, and he cannot tell which.
That doubt carries into the final stanza. "Whate'er she meant by 't, bury it with me." He calls himself "Love's martyr," so his hair bracelet could become a relic, and relics "might breed idolatry" if strangers handled them. The religious language is half serious and half mocking, since he is treating a failed love affair as a saint's death. Then the poem swerves. The speaker speaks to "you" for the first time, and says it is "some bravery," a defiant gesture, that "since you would save none of me, I bury some of you." Judging by that line, the woman refused him, though the poem gives no details. The neat balance of "none of me" against "some of you" delivers a reversal that is half revenge, half possession. He keeps a piece of her with him in the grave, and the tenderness of the opening turns into something nearer to spite.
The form helps this shift of tone. Each of the three stanzas has eight lines rhyming ABABCDCD, a steady frame for an argument full of "For," "If," and "Whate'er." Within that frame the line lengths keep changing, from long to short and ending on the longest. The short lines, such as "Nor question much" and "For 'tis my outward Soul," sound like quick, hushed asides, while the long closing lines let each stanza's point land with weight.
What makes the poem memorable is how much it holds in twenty-four lines. It is a joke about governing a body, a reflection on pain, and a lover's complaint, and it never settles into just one of them. Donne is often grouped with the metaphysical poets, and the habit of reasoning cleverly about an object until it opens onto real feeling shows clearly here. The speaker's wit works as a shield, and the final line shows how much hurt is underneath. The funeral is the setting, but the poem is really about a refusal and the dignity, or stubbornness, of someone who will not let it go unanswered.