"...we’ve lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue."
This is a light moment in an otherwise quite somber poem. Also, the contrast between the two wealthy characters—the heiress and the millionaire—versus the decorator hints that the speaker is saying that wealth can be a factor in alleviating or enhancing one's isolation.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
This line refers to the changing seasons and their effect on the landscape, but it also adds a measure of eeriness to the poem. Coming at the end of the stanza, it subverts the reader's expectation of some sort of resolution. Instead, it points away from the subjects of the poem. This lack of resolution spans the entire poem. Lowell does not offer to make sense out of these feelings, out of the movement of time; he merely offers them as they are.
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. . . .
Here the speaker's isolation becomes palpable. He is completely beyond the reach of those who he observes, and he is out of their reach as well. These people are gathered near the graveyard, which does seem like a likely place for young couples to go to be alone together, but his mention of it also adds additional gravity to the moment. Further, the cars, which lie "hull to hull" in silence, are reminiscent of coffins, which add implications about death—the ultimate and everlasting state of isolation.
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—
These lines in the poem illustrate the speaker's self-disgust. Even as part of him sobs, another part of it seizes it as if to hurt it. These lines also include a clear nod to John Milton's Paradise Lost, to Satan's lament where it becomes clear that hell is inescapable because it is inside him.
