Where It All Goes Down
“Love After Love” describes a strange visit in the indefinite future (“The time will come”), but the visitor comes from the past. The visitor is a “stranger” who “was your self,” who “has loved you all your life.”
The visit appears to take place in a house. There’s a door and a mirror and a bookshelf. Presumably, there are chairs to sit on and a table to hold bread and wine. But it soon becomes clear that this is not a real house; it’s a house of the mind. In this dreamlike environment, the strange visitor steps out of the mirror and joins you for dinner and conversation.
In that sense, the setting can be more accurately described as your own point of view… of yourself. What does that frame through which you see yourself look like? What pictures are there? What ideas does it suggest? The answers to those questions will give you a full sense of what the setting of this poem looks like.