John Donne's ‘An Anatomy of the World’ has a clear structure and yet allows itself to pursue particular fascinations and digressions within the established pattern. It is a poem of extremes: on the one hand, the overt idealising of Elizabeth Drury as a Platonic ‘best and first original / Of all fair copies’, and on the other, the exaggerated contempt of the world in its fallen and wounded state without her. The ‘Anatomy’ functions precisely through the invocation of ‘memory’, and does so in a constructed poetic ‘form and frame’. The remembrance of women in 1611 takes a variety of forms. As seen in the case of Donne, the process of commemorating women in 1611 could involve several different modes for the expression of a single los: he not only wrote in a familiar form, the elegy, but also contributed the text for Elizabeth Drury's sculpted tomb.