In Robert Browning's "Meeting at Night," the reader is given a number of clues as to where the speaker is going. In stanza one, the speaker describes "[t]he gray sea and the long black land" and "startled little waves" before stating that they "[gain] the cove with pushing prow." Through these descriptions, we can understand that the speaker has been traveling through a sea toward a specific cove and, by stanza's end, reaches the "slushy sand" within the cove.

In stanza two, the speaker's journey takes them across land. In particular, they travel across "a mile of warm sea-scented beach," followed by "three fields to cross till a farm appears." Upon reaching the farm, the speaker taps at the pane of a window, and then within there is "the blue spurt of a lighted match," followed by "a voice less loud." Clearly someone within the house was anticipating the arrival of the speaker, and when they do arrive, the other person quietly comes to join them as the final line reveals "two hearts beating each to each!"

To summarize: in the two stanzas, the narrator travels a fair distance across a body of water, another mile of beach on foot, and then across three fields in order to meet up with someone they love. The poem exercises discretion rather than explaining what happens when the two meet up, but the importance is not in the actual details of the meeting, but rather in the lengths to which the two will go in order to be together.