"Good-Bye Fox" begins, not with a goodbye, but with a meeting. The speaker remembers the day that she encountered a fox lounging about under a tree and struck up a conversation with him.
In just one line, the speaker tells readers a lot about both the fox and the world around him. Listen to the alliteration here:
He was lying under a tree, licking up the shade.
Those long /l/ sounds evoke lazy, languorous delight; the fox is positively luxuriating in the shade. In fact, he's "licking" it right up, a metaphor that suggests he's drinking in the delights of the world around him. The shadows don't just cool him, they nourish him, too, filling him with pleasure. Inside and out, he's satisfied.
And if he's enjoying the shade this much, readers might guess, it must be a sunny day out, perhaps a long summer afternoon. Neither the fox nor the speaker, this bit of scene-setting suggests, has anywhere to get to in a hurry.
This isn't the first time the speaker has met this fox either: she greets him with a familiar "Hello again." But the enjambment in the next lines suggest that there's something different about their encounter today:
And hello to you too, said Fox, looking up and
not bounding away.
The line break in the middle of a sentence here evokes the speaker's surprise, stressing the word "not": it's not normal for a wild animal to sit there peacefully while a human is near.
Of course, it's not normal to have a conversation with an anthropomorphic fox, either! But that part doesn't seem quite so surprising to the speaker. Setting this poem up as a perfectly ordinary dialogue between herself and an animal, she gives this poem the feeling of a fable, an instructive tale told by animal characters. This fox, readers suspect, might be here to teach the speaker something.
The poem's free verse form, without rhyme or meter, helps to underline its tongue-in-cheek tone, presenting an extraordinary conversation as an everyday chat. Ironically, the naturalistic language only reminds readers that what they're about to hear is a made-up story.