Summary
“Skunk Hour” by Robert Lowell starts in New England, where a “hermit heiress” acts as the poem’s initial focus. The speaker, an ambiguous “we” dangling over the story, tells the readers bluntly that the heiress' son is a bishop, a farmer on her farm holds a place in the local government, and that she is beginning to grow senile.
In the third stanza, we move away from this character to a “summer millionaire,” whose belongings are being scattered. It is unclear if he has died or simply left the area after summer. The stanza ends with the line, “A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.” This line seems to act as both a continuation of and a break with the anecdote about the millionaire.
Still speaking in the first person plural, the speaker makes a deliberate turn to a gay decorator in the village who changes the colors in his store for the turning season. Again, the speaker gives a straightforward delivery of declared facts, saying, “there is no money in his work,/he’d rather marry.” The only hint of contempt in the speaker's tone is in the word “fairy,” which is by nature derogatory, but the speaker takes it no further and offers no opinions.
The poem finally moves to the first person singular in the fifth stanza. In a car, the speaker, listening to the radio, watches for couples in other cars, then acknowledges his own voyeurism with a shiver of disgust, ending the stanza by saying, “My mind’s not right.” This disgust grows in the next stanza, where Lowell writes, “I hear/my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,/as if my hand were at its throat…” He makes a reference to Paradise Lost, saying, “I myself am hell”—similar to a quote by Satan in Milton's poem—and reasserting the fact that he is alone.
He then revises his statement by describing the skunks that come out at night to find food in the village. The speaker is not in the car anymore; instead, he watches the skunks march through the city, by the church.
The final stanza returns to the speaker, standing on “our back steps” and watching a mother skunk with her kittens. The skunk sticks her head in an empty tub of sour cream, and the speaker ends the poem by noting how she “will not scare.”
Analysis
This poem is a study of loneliness, one that navigates the facade of community to expose a hidden isolation within. For the first few stanzas, the speaker as an individual remains behind the shroud of the first person plural. The fact that the poem is told in the first person is not evident until the second-to-last line of the first stanza, when the speaker first uses the pronoun "we" to describe the local community. The poem makes clear that the character of the heiress is part of a greater community, referring to her in the first words of the poem as “Nautilus Island’s hermit.” Furthermore, the speaker says she “still” lives in a Spartan cottage, that her sheep “still” graze on the land; the use of the adverb “still” indicates that this scene is a continuation. The poem, therefore, seems to describe the passing of time and the cyclical nature of loneliness, rather than marking a specific moment. Though it describes isolation (a hermit), it places it in the context of a larger continuity with environment and community.
The hermit heiress desires "the hierarchic privacy/of Queen Victoria’s century," and this nostalgia drives her to buy properties around hers for their land. She desires a social structure that no longer exists; it is decaying like the properties that she buys. Perhaps, then, it is fitting that her replacement is the "summer millionaire," who either dies or does not spend more than the summer in this town. The speaker does not make it clear which is true; by calling him a "summer millionaire," the speaker suggests that he only stays seasonally. The next line, however, uses the word “leap” to describe how the millionaire looked like he came out of an L. L. Bean catalogue. Against the detached verbs that the speaker uses before, this one seems significant, full of action and purpose, maybe implying that the millionaire has committed suicide by leaping or falling from somewhere. The “red fox stain” on Blue Hill acts to emphasize, but not to clarify, this possibility; the redness and the word “stain” call blood to mind. But the stain literally refers to how the hill changes color with the season, which feeds into this poem's focus on decay.
The “fairy decorator,” too, moves with the seasons, changing his colors for fall. He is a lonely character, who would “rather marry” but does not have that choice. He exists in contrast against the heiress and the millionaire; the heiress wishes to be alone, and though the readers do not learn the millionaire’s cause of death, even if it were not suicide, the poem deals with how he ceases to exist, how his belongings are stripped from him, but not with his loneliness before he died, or with the loneliness of death. The gay decorator is the first of the three who is isolated in a way the speaker can relate to. The way he changes the colors in his shop to orange to reflect the change in seasons also shows that the heiress and the millionaire do not exist in time in the same way he does. They have no control over time, but they have more control over their circumstances than he does. His life is directed entirely by the seasons, by the customs of the era. For these reasons he acts as a bridge between the description of the villagers and the scene where the speaker watches lovers in their cars; both he and the speaker are lonely and lack agency against the passing of time.
In the fifth stanza, the speaker's voice shifts suddenly from a passive, almost neutral tone into one more aggressive, more pained. The speaker, alone, watches couples, noting that they are next to a graveyard and likening the hill his car climbs to a skull. The way he describes them ("Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull...") is reminiscent of a graveyard or a shipyard. After his words about the graveyard, the speaker seems to notice that his own tone and his own observations are saying more about him than they are about the people he observes. "My mind's not right," he says, and this line reads like an admission of guilt or an apology.
The speaker listens to the radio in his car and feels like he is pinning down his own "ill-spirit," which is perhaps a mental illness or his feelings of loneliness or grief. His reference to a line in Paradise Lost spoken by Satan contributes to his sense of self-hatred. Dying to focus on anything else, and perhaps exhausted by the similar loneliness he has described in other's lives, he turns to the skunks who he sees in the street at night, whose eyes outshine the town church. He describes them militaristically and richly with no hint of the sleepy voice that started the poem. Additionally, the mention of the church at the climax of this poem seems to indicate that the answer for this loneliness lies in synthesizing the power of the corporeal skunks with something spiritual.
The voice extends into the final stanza, where the speaker moves to "our back steps" and describes a single skunk rooting through his garbage, her kittens clinging to her. Finally, some steam has blown off the speaker. He is able to gaze at her unflinchingly. Perhaps he finds peace in her because she protects her family, or because she is unapologetic for her desires, or something else; it is unclear, but the final moment is cathartic.
This poem's rhyme scheme is important to note due to its changeability. Each stanza has multiple rhymes, but their placement varies. The effect is formal but uneven, mimicking the speaker's unevenness. The rhymes also add a sense of completion to the poem; as "Skunk Hour" is the last poem in the collection Life Studies, it makes sense that this poem ends on some, if not total, resolution.
