The text of "A Red, Red Rose" does not evoke a specific setting. Indeed, the world of the poem exists purely in a rhetorical space between the speaker and his beloved addressee.

However, it might be said that "A Red, Red Rose" reflects life in the Scottish countryside. Again, Burns does not say explicitly where this poem is set, but his work as a whole evokes the world he inhabited—that of rural Scotland in the latter decades of the eighteenth century. Burns's very poetic style, richly inflected as it is by his Scottish idiom, embodies the centrality of Scotland in his work.

Even though no specific setting is mentioned in this poem, it clearly evokes a natural setting by way of metaphor. Robert Burns was a major early contributor to Romanticism. Like all Romantic poets, Burns wanted his poems to connect readers to the natural world, and his native country provided ample inspiration with its sweeping landscapes and open spaces.

The first stanza of the poem compares the poet's love to a rose growing in June. The third stanza mentions natural elements that one would associate with the Scottish seaside in summer—sea, rocks, and sun. With these figurative elements, Burns brings elements of rural life and tangible imagery into the poem, even though the speaker's primary concerns remains his "Luve," from whom he is currently parted.