Skunk Hour Literary Elements

Speaker: Robert Lowell

Each line of this poem rhymes with another line, but the rhyme scheme deviates from stanza to stanza. The poem is not written in meter, though some lines are perfectly iambic ("The season’s ill— we’ve lost our summer millionaire").

Metaphors

"my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;"
Death is on the speaker's mind. In the stanzas following this, he observes lovers in their cars then looks at the graveyard behind the town. He does not explicitly liken the lovers in their cars to people in coffins, but the insinuation is there. By using the word "skull" as a metaphor for the hill, Lowell prepares the readers for the shift from the detached anecdotes about villagers to a dark, deeply personal scene about self-loathing.

"[the love-cars] lay together, hull to hull,"
This metaphor likens the cars to ships, dramatizing the distance the speaker feels between himself and other people.

Assonance:

"the eyesores facing her shore,"

"The season’s ill—
we’ve lost our summer millionaire,"

"he’d rather marry."

Alliteration:

"And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,"

"spar spire"

"my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;"

Poetry

New England

Unstable, variable, but revelatory

The speaker acts as both

The main conflict in this poem is the speaker's struggle with himself. He is incredibly lonely, both interpersonally and spiritually. He does not interact with any of the people he observes and describes, and he cannot imagine suffering worse than being himself; his existence is his personal hell, and he does not feel a divine presence coming to save him. The skunks resolve this conflict by dragging him out of his misery. Their traits foil godliness, yet with them he finds peace.

The third to last stanza, where the speaker tussles with his "ill-spirit" and is overwhelmed by how poorly he feels, acts as the emotional peak of the poem. However, the following two stanzas thrust the speaker into clarity, and they feel even more affecting.

"The season’s ill—"
This moment appears to foreshadow the speaker's illness.

The observations in the first few stanzas are almost affable, but they foreshadow how the speaker later observes people in their cars, feeling like an outsider.

"I myself am hell"
This is an easily recognizable reference to Milton's Paradise Lost, where Satan says something very similar. By likening himself to Satan, the speaker shows the readers how horrible he thinks he is.

"'Love, O careless Love...'"
These lyrics are pulled from a popular blues song, "Careless Love," that mourns the negative consequences of loving carelessly or being loved carelessly. The lyrics to this song often change, but the part quoted here remains the same. Instead of addressing a person, the song addresses love as if it were one. This reads like a way to blame oneself and one's feelings for failure in a relationship. Aptly, this allusion appears in the part of the poem where the speaker is torturing himself.

The speaker personifies the skunks in the town a little by saying that they "march," but he does not go overboard trying to project human traits onto them.