Skunk Hour (1959). Content and Description

Perhaps Lowell’s best-known poem, “Skunk Hour” is the last poem in the seminal book Life Studies. At the end of a very personal book filled with informal diction, “Skunk Hour” leaves the reader with a description of the decaying New England town of Castine. The short lines, irregular rhymes, and careful use of sound and rhythm in “Skunk Hour” suggest an element of control that most of the poems in Life Studies lack. Also, the emphasis on imagery and description rather than autobiographic disclosure broadens the scope of the poem’s implications, removing it from a purely confessional context. Despite the limited authorial presence, however, “Skunk Hour” remains one of Lowell’s most personal and revealing poems.

What exactly the poem reveals is, of course, subject to critical debate. The most significant point of contention falls on the final image of the skunks waddling through town. In a letter to John Berryman, Lowell wrote that the skunks “are horrible blind energy.” Many people read them along those lines as the literal stench of a decomposing society. This interpretation figures the skunks as the remaining life source in a dead environment, scavenging for human waste. Others, however, see the skunks as a cheerful image. Rather than seeing a hopeless situation deteriorating to animal instincts, critics such as Charles Altieri and James E. B. Breslin argue that the skunks suggest an opportunity to refigure religious fanaticism as secular ritual. The reformation, while not completely freeing, does allow the poem’s speaker, presumably Lowell, to stand back at the end of the scene to “breathe the rich air” (192).

While differing on the final implications of “Skunk Hour,” both sides of the debate acknowledge the general malaise of the poem’s initial observations. The heiress is in her dotage, buying up property and letting it fall apart. The summer millionaire auctioned off his yawl and left town. And the token gay decorator uses tools of the town’s once-prosperous industry as ornamentation. Despite the tone of understated humor, Lowell describes the collapse of a social structure.

The critic Paul Breslin, however, points out that the severity of the problems wanes when compared to most other destitute populations in the country: “The sinister language of illness (‘the season’s ill’) and contamination (‘A red fox stain covers Blue Hill’) does not rest on a convincing portrayal of anything sinister in the environment; it is only intelligible as the projection of the poet’s internal sense of foreboding” (69). Although limited, the use of personal pronouns gives “Skunk Hour” its intimacy. When Lowell writes “My mind’s not right,” he conditions all of the previous observations as based upon his questionable perspective (191). In that sense, the social deterioration described in “Skunk Hour” dramatizes the tensions of Lowell’s psychological state. Within the context of a mind that quotes Satan from John Milton’s 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost (“I myself am hell”), we begin to see the extent of Lowell’s anxious relationship with the world.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Lowell dedicates “Skunk Hour” to his friend and fellow poet Elizabeth Bishop. Read Bishop’s poem “The Armadillo” and compare her use of the personal pronoun I to Lowell’s. How does the authorial presence differ in each of the poems? Also, consider the presence of animals at the end of each poem and how the authors related differently to those animals.

2. The fourth stanza of “Skunk Hour” introduces a gay character whom Lowell chooses to describe as “our fairy / decorator” who would rather marry than find lucrative work. What does the character add to Lowell’s description of the traditional New England town? How does the decorator’s profession factor into the town’s general economic situation? And how does Lowell’s use of the word our position the decorator in relation to the rest of the town’s population?

3. Lowell ends “Skunk Hour” by stating that the mother skunk “will not scare” (192). Of what might the skunk be scared? What does its persistence determine about the skunks’ place within the town’s social structure?