The poem is primarily set in an imaginative world filled with complex symbols. The speaker takes the reader on a sort of tour of the world of poetic symbols: up the winding staircase, past the painted chair, through the groves, past the arbour, and by the stream. This world is beautiful, and filled with beautiful images –but it is also, the speaker argues, not real. At the end of the poem, readers are thrust out of the world of poetic images and returned to reality. This world is not described in any visual detail, but it is less complex and more real.