This poem takes its setting – the countryside – as a principal subject. However, it is unusual among place-focused poems in that it provides very little depiction of its setting. Most poems focused on place contain fairly extensive descriptions of the setting itself (details of the natural world, of the houses it contains, and so on). Philips, however, chooses to leave her setting almost entirely abstract. There is no depiction of the physical nature of the setting; it remains a psychological and spiritual space, emphasizing the poem's focus on the moral superiority of the country over the court.