This dark setting helps provide more vividness for the reader to utterly comprehend the poem. By knowing where the setting is occurring and what exactly it is, then it can help the reader imagine how an asylum actually is. Asylums are normally dark places where many deep emotions happen. Patients at asylums are in extreme situations where they either want to kill them self's or harm others. However, in their own head they are normal human beings . In the poem Lola Ridge says "By the railings the prisoners are clinging". She says this because railings are like the walls of a prison cell, and the mentally un stable patients feel as if they are in prison. This is why Lola Ridge does not entitle the patients as patients but, more like inmates. People in these mental institutions have serious problems. By really capturing where the setting is taking place it is easier to get a wider look at the poem. For example, when the writer says "An acre of garden and sky" she means the boundary of not being able to escape this horrific place. Its not only the boundary of a mental institution but a land you will spend a working and hard life to freehold being effectively chained down when you cannot choose to simply walk out. .
In continuation, The Insane acquires a extremely abnormal and harsh tone. The tone in a poem is the attitude the author is showing though his or her writing. In The Insane, Lola Ridge writes about being a prisoner in an asylum. Asylums are dark places where unpleasant things occur. Patients are forced into asylums with no choice of a way out. Many patients develop anger as the days pass by, because they just want to be set free. Lola wrote "Know we are the wise men and sages, and ye are the children and fools.". In that phrase she is showing anger towards the doctors and works. She takes them as fools, kind of like if the patients are the smart ones and they are the dumb ones.