This poem has a complex relationship to setting. Although many places are mentioned in the poem: islands, promontories, Europe, continents, and even the implication of churches, none of those can really be said to be the setting of the poem. The poem talks about places, but it does not take place in them. Instead, the poem is set entirely within the speaker's words. There is no real physical world of the text, just like there is no real action in the text. Instead, the speaker (Donne himself), is consumed wholly by his thoughts, meditating on the nature of death as he himself declines in illness.