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Category: English | Posted By: admin | Rating: 
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Robert Lowell’s 1976 poem, “Skunk Hour”, written for his fellow American poet, Elizabeth Bishop, is filled with images and descriptions of deterioration. The complex rhyme scheme and symbols of varying meaning convey the narrator’s opinions of the town and people that were once so much more than the houses in disrepair and dark nights. Lowell’s use of end rhyme in the poem adds a rhythm by which the poem flows, adding complexity and continuity. The symbols used throughout the poem may be slightly confusing to the reader as they appear private to the poet himself. Lowell symbolizes objects, animals, and locations, and leaves the reader to interpret their specific meanings accordingly. The exact meanings of the symbols are not completely clear to the reader, the author perhaps intending this.
The introduction of the poem focuses solely on one woman, with Lowell filling the first four stanzas with a view of the declining state that surrounds the “hermit heiress” (1-2) in the poem. Not only are her own conditions worsening, but the town and society in which she lives as well. There is a possibility that these lines refer to Elizabeth Bishop herself, the woman that the poem was written for. Perhaps Lowell’s opinion of how her later years were spent is illustrated here. In the bleak atmosphere seen in the first stanza Lowell includes symbols representing high authority and ranking in social status, the woman’s son is a bishop, and even her farmer is a high ranking city official, known as a “selectman”. The lonely heiress lives a simple and elegant life in her “Spartan cottage”, yet her sanity, or possibly her memory, is deteriorating. She fanatically buys up all of the “eyesores” surrounding her, “thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria’s century,” enjoying the resulting solitude as if it were an obsession.
The bleak image of the heiress’ existence is carried throughout the poem, with death and emptiness filling the environment. The third stanza presents a transition from winter to summer, the focus shifting to the “summer millionaire” of the village, a character whose monetary value is described in his put together appearance, as he “seemed to leap from an L.L. Bean.” The narrator describes how he will not return, the man once a millionaire is now nothing. His boat, a valuable “nine-knot yawl”, which is presumably where his passion lay is now being auctioned off. The next transition from summer to fall in the fourth stanza discusses a man with shop. The man’s business is failing, just as the heiress’ numerous estates crumbled and the millionaire’s luck had run out. The theme of decline is continued, he has sold little, and does not even have money to buy food. He is unable to catch fish, as the reference to his "fishnets filled with orange cork" shows. The line “he’d rather marry”, refers to his lack of wife and how he would prefer love to the lack of money in his work.
The final shift in the poem changes from the outward characters of the village to the inward thoughts of the narrator. In these last four stanzas Lowell sets a man alone, in a place or society that used to be full of people, but who now have vanished. In the fifth stanza the character is in his “Tudor ford” and begins to go insane, but realizes this and catches himself, as he states “My mind’s not right”. Continuing to the sixth and seventh stanza, the character is now hearing things, believing people are present, but yet there are only skunks among him. These skunks may be the lowest animal, but now they are the only companions. The skunks continue to the church where they have sanctuary with their family. The Main Street of the town symbolizes the ranking of society and how it has fallen to the level of a skunk. The man now understands his place in the last stanza, the society is crippled, and he is alone. As the character stated in the sixth stanza, “nobody’s here”. The man knows he is alone, among the skunks of the society, and he is content as he breathes the “rich air”. The character sees the family of skunks, working together to scrounge for food and can see that society is not what matters, but family.
Lowell’s poem is perceived differently by each reader. A reader must search for meaning of the symbols presented, and find the meaning that the reader can relate to personally. Throughout the extent of the poem, the transitions from one character to the next are all connected by the theme of decay. We see the old woman who is past her prime, the millionaire who has lost his fortune, the unsuccessful businessman, and a narrator who is completely alone in the world. These concepts provide the poem with fluidity, the flow from one stanza to the next tied in from one character to another.
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