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“One Art” doesn’t have a specific setting. The only sense of the poem’s present time comes in the final stanza, when the speaker addresses an anonymous “you,” whom they’re preparing to lose. Even so, the speaker offers no concrete details about a particular time or place. Though the poem lacks a specific setting, it’s worth noting how the speaker’s loss of “you” causes them to think about the many times they’ve faced loss in their life. Many of these experiences are tied to specific places the speaker had to leave behind. For instance, in the fourth stanza they refer to losing “my last, or / next-to-last, of three loved houses” (lines 10–11). They go on to recount further losses in the following stanza: “I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, / some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent” (13–14). The speaker’s references to places remain veiled and obscure. But what’s most important about such references is that they all live in the speaker’s memory. In this sense, the poem’s setting could be understood as a composite realm of the various places the speaker has lost, and which persist only in their memory.

Next section Themes

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