This poem has no particular setting – there are no references to place or time, and even the date of composition is unknown and cannot be used to clearly define a setting. However, the poem does center on a relationship between its writer and its subject that took place in the early modern English court. Furthermore, many of the poem's lines represent ideas of courtly virtues that are consistent with how relationships between writers like Jonson and noblewomen like Mary Wroth would have been constructed in this era – as relationships of romantic, but distant, admiration. The poem can therefore be said to be, if not quite set in this court, a useful insight into what it might have feel like to live and work within it.