The primary setting of the poem is the second-best bed itself, as the speaker describes the physical and spiritual union that took place there between her and her husband. The poem makes reference to numerous other settings, saying that the bed was "a spinning world / of forests, castles, torchlight, cliff-tops, seas / where he would dive for pearls" (1-3). These descriptions are significant for two reasons: first, they establish the speaker's conflation of Shakespeare's famous work with his less famous marriage, alluding to land and seascapes from his plays that are easily recognizable to readers. Second, that the speaker equates the bed with these other, more expansive settings suggests that through her union with her husband, they transcended the boundaries of time and space. Here, in the very first lines of the poem, the speaker elevates the "second-best" bed to a role that challenges the very notion of...