Skunk Hour
Nautilus Island’s hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
she’s in her dotage.
Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.
The season’s ill—
we’ve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he’d rather marry.
One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind’s not right.
A car radio bleats,
“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
Glossary:
hull to hull – the speaker sees the cars as boats, next to one another as if on a river, maybe the river Styx from Greek mythology, associated with the final crossing of the soul?
hill’s skull – a suggestion of Golgotha, or Calvary which was the hill Christ was crucified on. Both words, Golgotha (from Hebrew) and Calvary (from Latin) translate as ‘skull’.
spar spire – mastlike spire
Tudor Ford – Ford luxury car
Commentary
Skunk Hour is a confessional poem written in 1957. It depicts a man at a moment of crisis in his life. It was the last poem in an important volume of poetry titled Life Studies (1959), one of Lowell’s most influential publications. This is a dark and thought-provoking poem, with religious anxieties surfacing, and it raises issues that are universal and relevant for us today. The speaker admits to secretly watching lovers in their cars at night and this makes him feel bad. He confesses to being a type of voyeur – a victim of a modern, uncaring, materialistic community, a depressed loner who will resort to spying on young couples for titillation.
The first four verses of Skunk Hour focus on several prominent inhabitants of Nautilus Island, Maine: the ‘hermit heiress’, the ‘summer millionaire’, and the ‘fairy decorator’. Brief descriptions set the scene until the main protagonist, the sad, lonely speaker, begins his rather pathetic confession. Lowell once remarked, ‘The first four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or less amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town’.
In fact, as Scott Edward Anderson tells us, ‘he wrote the poem “backwards,” the final stanzas before the opening four, but did it with such seeming ease that the opening reads as almost a laconic warm-up exercise or scene-setter’. In truth, however, the opening four verses are masterful: the weight of his forthcoming confession weighs so heavily upon him that he delays and obfuscates because of the enormity of it. Lowell is human, after all.
The scene is set by first introducing the old and frail heiress of the island who is a stickler for tradition, a conservative, a fading aristocrat landowner with a bishop for a son, and ruins for the future. The poet’s diction reflects this refusal to move on by using the word still twice to emphasize the longevity of her reign. She clings on through the winter, and the sheep go on grazing. Even her farmer (more likely her gardener) is a traditional local administrator (selectman) in the speaker’s own village.
The tone is one of mild desperation at this stage in the poem, the heiress thirsting for a return to the glorious days of old Queen Victoria, when the great and good ruled supreme and everyone knew their place. Basically, she’s living in the past and as derelict buildings come on the market, she buys them up ‘and lets them fall’, presumably to protect her privacy, as well as to reclaim some semblance of what the place resembled in the previous golden era.
The line, ‘she’s in her dotage’, echoes ‘the world is in its dotage’ from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). Note the way the poet uses end half-rhyme (slant or near or imperfect rhyme) in cottage/village/dotage which suggests that things are not making full sense, and there is little harmony. These combine to endorse the idea that on this island things are falling into a state of disrepair, which doesn’t bode well for the future.
Skunk Hour is a free verse poem of eight sestets (six-line stanzas). There is no set rhyme scheme but there are interesting end rhymes and some internal rhymes that help our understanding. These sounds, a variation on a theme of ill, are half-rhymes and produce an echo that keeps the reader in touch with the voice of the speaker, alive in a season that is itself ill. This is illustrated by the demise of ‘our summer millionaire’ who despite putting on a fashionable outward appearance falls ill and dies and his yawl ‘was auctioned off to lobstermen’. Lowel’s use of words like lost, leap, and auctioned off all point to a person permanently not returning, his boat now belonging to locals who will put it to better use. The stanza ends with the enigmatic line, ‘A red fox stain covers Blue Hill’. Lowell reassures us that the line ‘was merely meant to describe the rusty reddish colour of autumn on Blue Hill, a Maine mountain near where we were living’.
In stanza four the plot thickens, and we are introduced to the “fairy decorator,” actually, “our fairy decorator,” because every summer village from Massachusetts to Bangor, Maine, had one! He appropriates the tools of the local fishing and lobstering trade to decorate the windows of his shop, and would “rather marry,” presumably an heiress, since there’s “no money in his work” and without any prospect of marrying someone of his own sex for at least another half-century. Of course, this was before the arrival of political correctness! Lowell would no doubt be challenged by his characterization here were he writing today. The full-end rhyme fall/awl and half-rhymes cork/work and fairy/marry help tie up this stanza, a near-comic portrayal of a guy making the best out of a sorry situation. Wedlock would seem to be a way out of a life destined for a peculiar kind of sad, island loneliness. In these four stanzas, Lowell has masterfully built up a vivid portrait of a threadbare New England village and its archetypes.
Stanza five offers us some clues as to what the poet is wrestling with in his own darkness, his own crisis point: the stanza opens with “One dark night,” and he ends the stanza with, “My mind’s not right.” ‘One Dark Night’ as well as being a good opening for a scary story told at Halloween also has echoes of ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’ as depicted by St. John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic monk and poet from the 16th century. In a talk ‘On Skunk Hour’, Lowell stated,
‘I hoped my readers would remember St John of the Cross’s poem. My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan, and agnostic. An existentialist night.’
The speaker’s dark troubled secret is revealed in this stanza, giving the poem its confessional nature. He climbs into his Ford Tudor sedan and drives up to a quiet graveyard on a hill overlooking the town and he watches the young couples necking in their cars, windows steaming in the late summer night – it is late August, early September. He remembers the anecdote related to him by Elizabeth Bishop of Walt Whitman in his old age being driven by horse and buggy to witness the hillside lovers in a bygone era and imagines the internal satisfaction that that poet felt from seeing young people in love. Lowell was continually influenced by Elizabeth Bishop’s work and, apparently, the Bishop poem that inspired Lowell’s Skunk Hour and helped unlock his new, freer style, was The Armadillo which was written in Brazil in the mid-fifties at the height of the Cold War. ‘Armadillo is one of your absolutely top poems, your greatest quatrain poem,’ Lowell writes to Bishop late in 1958. ‘I mean it has a wonderful formal-informal grandeur – I see the bomb in it in a delicate way.’ It was originally published in The New Yorker in June of 1957 and she later dedicated the poem to Lowell when it appeared in Questions of Travel in 1965. Lowell, in turn, dedicated Skunk Hour to Bishop.
So, in stanza five the speaker is revealed to us at last; having ‘hidden’ behind the first four stanzas he finally reveals his dark secret: he has come here to this Golgotha to spy, like some Judas, on couples having sex in their cars:
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
And that line about the graveyard is a powerful hint – it ‘shelves’ or slopes down and so the island’s dead are looking in on this love-making too, just like the speaker. The four dots at the end of this line are poignant and pregnant with possibility. The stanza ends in self-reflection with yet another confession: ‘My mind’s not right’.
In the sixth stanza, the speaker is so close to the cars on the hill he can hear music from one of the radios. He hears snippets of Fats Domino singing “Careless Love,” and this depresses him even further and he realizes he is on a fool’s mission: he won’t find what he is looking for here either. He heads back down the hill, noticing off to his left, that autumn has already arrived on Blue Hill, and in the fading light, the hill is turning ‘fox red’, as the first trees and the low shrubs start to turn. He admits that his “mind’s not right.” He needs to get home. When he reaches the house, he enters through the back porch so as not to disturb his wife and three-month-old child.
At this point, the speaker feels completely alone, in sharp juxtaposition to the lovers in their cars on the nearby hill. Some have argued that Lowell was feeling suicidal here, or more likely he was coming to the realization that he was on the verge of another manic episode. (He’d been free of such episodes for three years but in December 1957 he was again admitted to Boston State Hospital).
Ascending the back stairs, he is startled by a noise from the garbage cans behind the house. A mother skunk and her kittens are nosing around in the spilled contents which include a cup of sour cream that the mother skunk jabs her nose into with abandon. Nature comes to his rescue in the form of the instinctive skunk, a mother with her young in tow out looking for food. The speaker seems almost relieved as he watches this family go about their business of surviving in an urban environment, an unnatural one for these animals.
The last two stanzas bring some redemption for the sad speaker, whose meaningless existence in a Maine backwater is put on hold temporarily by the simple act of witnessing a lowly skunk scavenging with her young kittens.
Skunk Hour and the other poems Lowell wrote late in 1957 turned increasingly inward only to emerge into an outward flourish of personal expression that critics came to call “confessional.” The overall tone of Skunk Hour is pessimistic, even depressing – there is an atmosphere of doubt, failure, and poverty of spirit, relieved temporarily by the actions of the courageous if slightly disgusting, skunks. Only they seem to live brightly in the here and now of Nautilus Island. It’s not a fun place to exist in according to the speaker; there is a sickness pervading, and he seems to be a victim of it, admitting that ‘my mind’s not right’. He probably sensed another manic bout in the offing and, sure enough, by December 1957 Lowell was again hospitalized due to bipolar disorder, the mental condition then known as “manic depression”. While bipolar disorder was often a great burden to the writer and his family, it also provided the subject matter for some of Lowell’s most influential poetry, such as Skunk Hour and the other poems included in his prize-winning volume, Life Studies (1959).
References:
Anderson, Scott Edward. The Nautilus of Robert Lowel’s Skunk Hour, in http://www.svjlit.com/
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