Where It All Goes Down
From the poem, we're able to gather that the landscape includes the windswept woods and hills around an isolated country house. Most likely, Hughes was inspired by his surroundings in Yorkshire farm country in Great Britain, where he grew up. In this poem, it seems like a fairly bleak and chaotic place—though sort of awe-inspiring in other ways:
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet (2-4)
Hughes strives to bring out the sheer wildness of the place—even though it's probably closer to civilization than a lot of other places. Here, though, poor magpies and gulls are casually pushed around, and human beings are intimidated by the wind's force. This is a land where anything can happen, and where the powers-that-be refuse to play by humanity's rules.