The Full Text of “Skunk Hour”
The Full Text of “Skunk Hour”
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“Skunk Hour” Introduction
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"Skunk Hour" is the final poem in Robert Lowell's trailblazing collection Life Studies (1959). Its speaker first describes some features and residents of a declining coastal town, then confesses that he's having a mental health crisis there—apparently a bout of severe depression. The foraging skunks he witnesses outside his house, seem to embody the awfulness of his situation and/or the resilience he may need to survive it. The "Skunk Hour" thus becomes a metaphor for a low point or "dark night of the soul." First published in Partisan Review in 1958, the poem marked a key contribution to the Confessionalist movement and remains one of Lowell's most famous.
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“Skunk Hour” Summary
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The reclusive heiress of Nautilus Island in Maine still survives the winter in her austere little house, and her flock of sheep still eats grass on the shore. Her son is a senior church official, and her hired farmer is also the senior member of our small town's governing board. She's gotten senile.
Craving the privacy enjoyed by elites in the Victorian era, she purchases all the ugly buildings in sight of her beach and lets them go to ruin (or allows them to be demolished).
Something seems wrong this season. The rich man who used to spend summers here, and who looked like a model from a catalogue selling pricey outdoor wear, has gone away for good (or died). He left behind his sailboat, which could go nine nautical miles per hour, for lobster fishermen to bid on. The leaves on the local mountain called Blue Hill are the color of a red fox.
Now, the local decorator (a "fairy," an offensive/outdated term for a gay man) spruces up his store for autumn. He hangs up a fishermen's net and orange corks; his workbench and hole-punching tool are orange, too. His shop is unprofitable; he'd rather get married than keep running it.
On a dark night, I drove my old-fashioned Ford up to the crown of the hill and looked for people making out in cars. With their lights low, the cars sat side by side, near the cemetery that slopes down to the village. Something's wrong with my brain.
I hear a car radio bawling the blues song "Careless Love." My depression seems to make each of my blood cells weep, as if I were strangling it. Hell is my own mind. I'm all alone—
Except for the skunks who forage for food by moonlight. They pad in a line up Main Street, their white stripes and red eyes moonlit beneath the chalky-white, mast-like steeple of the Trinitarian Church.
At home, I stand on our back stoop and inhale the pungent air. A skunk and her brood of children are eating out of the garbage. She sticks her wedge-shaped head into a sour cream container, lowers her plumed tail, and won't be shooed away.
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“Skunk Hour” Themes
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Depression, Despair, and Resilience
Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour" is considered a classic of "confessional" poetry, in part due to its frank portrait of mental illness. Lonely and depressed, the poem's speaker feels with horror that his "mind's not right" and that his "hand" is strangling his "spirit." In this way, the poem conveys the torturous pain and self-loathing that can accompany severe depression, something that can make the world and one's own mind feel like an inescapable "hell." At the same time, the poem's ambiguous final image of garbage-eating skunks perhaps offers some hope: while the skunks might represent the ugliness of the speaker's situation, they might also represent a kind of fearless resilience under grim circumstances. In the end, the poem's complex symbolism suggests that while depression may feel inescapably hellish, the speaker can survive it.
The poem takes place in a dreary New England town whose desolation mirrors the speaker's inner turmoil. The speaker casts himself as the loneliest resident of this lonely, declining town, someone who voyeuristically watches young lovers while feeling his "ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, / as if my hand were at its throat." In other words, he feels his isolation acutely and senses his psychological agony throughout his body.
The speaker's allusions throughout the poem further suggest that he feels tormented and trapped by his own mind, imprisoned in a "hell" he can't escape. The poem takes place on a "dark night," for example, which is an allusion to the "dark night of the soul" in the Catholic tradition—and, more specifically, to a poem by St. John of the Cross. Like that poem's speaker, the speaker of Lowell's poem feels fevered, anxious, and in spiritual distress. The speaker also drives onto a "hill's skull," a reference to Golgotha (Hebrew for "skull"), the hill where Jesus was crucified in the Bible. The allusion suggests that for the speaker, his mental/spiritual crisis feels like physical torture. The speaker declares that "I myself am hell," almost directly quoting Satan in John Milton's Paradise Lost, who declares that "myself am hell" as an expression of his inner pain.
The skunks at the close of the poem may be part of the hellish ugliness, but in their stubborn survival, they may offer some symbolic comfort as well. The speaker spies these skunks while walking through town and notes that they're "search[ing] / in the moonlight for a bite to eat." They're probably not pleasant to look at or smell, but like him, they're just trying to survive.
Back home, the speaker sees a "mother skunk" and her "kittens" eating sour cream out of his garbage can. As distasteful as this image is, it's also a strange scene of family togetherness. And as the speaker "breathe[s] the rich air" around him, the verb emphasizes that he's alive and breathing, even if the air smells funny. The fact that the mother skunk "will not scare," meanwhile, suggests both that she won't go away and that she is fearless. As a symbol, she might suggest that the "sour[ness]" or foulness of the speaker's mood won't go away. On the other hand, she might represent the kind of toughness that will help him survive his mood.
Her resilience also ties back to that of the poem's other mother figure: the "heiress" who “still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage," with sheep who "still graze above the sea." Heiress, sheep, and skunk(s) all seem to prove that survival in a bleak setting is possible, even if one's circumstances are "Spartan" or unglamorous. The skunks may be meant to disgust and disturb, then, but they could also be emblems of hope. In his public remarks on the poem, Lowell suggested that both readings could be true!
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-48
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Love and Loneliness
"Skunk Hour" never spells out the source of its speaker's sadness, but it strongly implies that the reasons involve loneliness and/or heartbreak. He perceives his surrounding community as full of loneliness, and the fact that he watches lovers like a peeping Tom suggests his own desire for love and connection. Likewise, the poem's closing image of a family of skunks suggests a strange kind of togetherness—a communion of sorts that the speaker lacks. Though it doesn't provide the speaker any kind of happy ending, the poem emphasizes the human need for loving connection and the horror of its absence.
The speaker portrays himself, and others in his community, as isolated and love-starved. There's the local "hermit heiress" who buys up and destroys neighboring properties just to avoid having neighbors; the community's "summer millionaire," who's either died or left town for good; and the local "decorator," who would "rather marry" than keep tending his unprofitable shop.
In different ways, these figures seem to reflect the speaker's own loneliness. His isolation might be partly self-imposed, but he also seems to yearn for connection. Voyeuristically, the speaker "watche[s]" the town's young people making out in "love-cars," as if desperate even for proximity to love. While doing so, he hears lyrics from a car radio: "Love, O careless love..." These come from the blues song "Careless Love," and they underscore the blues he's feeling himself, apparently due to loneliness and/or love troubles. (The song's lyrics involve betrayal and heartbreak and contain references to suicide and murder, so they're a direct reminder of his inner pain.)
Only the young lovers and the skunks the speaker watches experience some form of love or togetherness. The "mother skunk" and her "kittens" eating out of the garbage at first seem disturbing and distasteful, but they could also be seen as a strange image of maternal love and family connection: the mother has found food for her babies, and they're sharing a meal. The speaker watches this scene much as he watched the teenagers in their "love-cars": he's interested, but not part of it. The scene's meaning is thus ambiguous; if it offers a form of consolation, it doesn't alleviate the speaker's loneliness in any direct way. It suggests that connection is possible, but also that it may not be possible for him.
Of course, it could also be read as a disgusting mockery of communion and togetherness. In that case, the "Skunk Hour" would simply be one's low point, the point of absolute depression. Still, the speaker—who was isolated in his car—is now standing on "our" steps, suggesting that some kind of home, however imperfect, awaits him inside.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-36
- Lines 43-48
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Civic Life and Decay
Robert Lowell described "Skunk Hour" as, in part, "a dawdling more or less amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town." The poem's details strongly stress the decline part of the equation. Set in an unnamed coastal "village" in Maine, it evokes an atmosphere of abandonment, isolation, and slow decay. The town's deterioration seems both to intensify and to reflect the speaker's own mental health crisis. The poem thus draws a subtle connection between the civic and the personal, suggesting that larger cultural maladies can manifest themselves as problems in one's individual psyche.
Although the speaker's portrayal of the town has charming aspects, it mostly conjures up a bleak and ominous atmosphere. The poem is inspired by the town of Castile, Maine, along with neighboring Blue Hill and nearby Nautilus Island. The "hermit heiress" of that island has connections to town, but she's both senile ("in her dotage") and determined to live in the kind of snobby "privacy" the speaker associates with the Victorian era. As the first character mentioned in the poem, she seems emblematic of the broader community's decay and stubborn isolation.
Meanwhile, the local "millionaire" has either died or moved away to seek greener pastures. The town, it seems, has lost some of its wealth and cachet. The local decorator is dissatisfied in his work and love life; the term "fairy" also implies that he's gay. (It's an offensive term in current culture, and Lowell was writing in a deeply homophobic era, but it's unclear how much judgement he intends by this description. The mainstream culture of his time viewed homosexuality as a mental illness, so Lowell may be implying as much. But this can also be read as a sympathetic portrait, stressing the loneliness and discontent that came of being a gay man—unable to legally "marry"—in small-town '50s America.)
In general, the speaker says, "The season's ill"—meaning the summer season during which a beach town like this one would normally thrive. The town seems to be ailing or deteriorating due to unnamed, possibly irreversible causes.
The town's condition seems to reflect the speaker's own, and vice versa. If this village and its summer are "ill," so, too, is the speaker. His perception of this surrounding "ill[ness]" may be partly projection, of course, but his mental illness could also be partly triggered by dreary surroundings. Indeed, both things can be true at once: the poem suggests that individual life and civic/cultural life are interrelated, and the borderline between them is blurry. The speaker acknowledges that "My mind's not right." The local heiress is senile, so her "mind's not right," either. The millionaire who's left town was a caricature of himself (he looked straight out of a "catalogue"). The local decorator is lonely and frustrated, and perhaps closeted or constrained in expressing his sexuality. Even the town's young lovers make out next to a graveyard—a macabre choice! Not all of these issues are equally serious, but the speaker's sense of ill health and unease seems pervasive: nothing around him seems quite "right."
In all these ways, the poem suggests that individual suffering and social decay are closely linked. If "Skunk Hour" is a metaphor for one's low point or "dark night" of the soul, the poem suggests that a whole society can reach that point. The speaker knows he's depressed, but something also smells off about the culture around him.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-30
- Lines 37-42
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Skunk Hour”
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Lines 1-6
Nautilus Island's hermit ...
... in her dotage."Skunk Hour" begins with a dedication to Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell's longtime friend and fellow American poet. Lowell acknowledged that Bishop's poem "The Armadillo," which she had dedicated to him, was the inspiration for "Skunk Hour." Both poems feature unsettling, symbolic animals that reflect human emotions and culture in ambiguous ways. (For more on the connections between the two poems, see the Context section of this guide.)
The first stanza of "Skunk Hour" starts to establish the poem's setting. It mentions Nautilus Island, a small private island off the coast of Maine, as well as "our village," which goes unnamed in the poem but is based on the town of Castine, Maine. (Robert Lowell had spent the summer of 1957 in Castine, which sits across the water from Nautilus Island.)
According to the speaker, a "hermit / heiress"—a reclusive woman with inherited wealth—lives on the island in a "Spartan cottage," or austere, simple beach home. She raises "sheep," who eat grass on the shore "above the sea," and employs a "farmer" to manage her land. The farmer also holds the position of "first selectman" (head of the town governing board, similar to mayor) in the village. Apparently, this is a very small town (Castine has never had more than about 1,400 residents) where even the senior politician has a second job.
Meanwhile, the heiress's "son" is "a bishop." If he's a Catholic bishop, he presumably won't have kids, and if he's an only child, he's the last of the heiress's family line. (His occupation is also an odd echo of Elizabeth Bishop's name—maybe Lowell's way of writing her into the poem!) The heiress herself is "in her dotage," meaning senile.
Already, then, there's an overhanging atmosphere of isolation, decline, and loss. These initial details suggest that even the most privileged residents of this place—its economic, political, and spiritual elite—are just getting by:
- The heiress "still lives through winter" in an unglamorous cottage, though she could probably afford better; her "sheep still graze" on what they can find. The repetition of "still" evokes a stubborn persistence and survival (Maine winters are harsh!).
- The head of the town's government is also a farmer, so most likely, neither job alone pays enough to live on.
- And in a town this small, how big could that "bishop['s]" congregation possibly be? Everyone seems to be making the best of things in this remote place, but there's no sense of growth or renewal to offset the slow decline.
This first stanza establishes the poem's form: rhymed sestets with no coherent meter or consistent rhyme scheme. This combination makes for language that's musical, but somewhat unstable and disorderly, evoking both the decay of the town and (later) the speaker's own instability.
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Lines 7-12
Thirsting for ...
... lets them fall. -
Lines 13-18
The season's ill— ...
... covers Blue Hill. -
Lines 19-24
And now our ...
... he'd rather marry. -
Lines 25-30
One dark night, ...
... mind's not right. -
Lines 31-36
A car radio ...
... nobody's here— -
Lines 37-42
only skunks, that ...
... the Trinitarian Church. -
Lines 43-48
I stand on ...
... will not scare.
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“Skunk Hour” Symbols
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Skunks
The skunks in "Skunk Hour" carry a strong whiff of symbolism. There's not a lot of traditional symbolism associated with skunks, at least in Western literature, but in everyday life, their awful-smelling spray makes them symbols of the unpleasant, undesirable, disgusting, etc. Since their smell is also notoriously hard to wash off, they can also be associated with lingering unpleasantness.
Lowell seems to be drawing on these general associations here, while also turning the skunks into an ambiguous symbol all his own. It's not clear whether the speaker ever smells the skunk odor, though it's certainly possible. In any case, these skunks are like stubborn pests (from a human standpoint), overrunning "Main Street" and eating out of the speaker's "garbage." They "will not scare"—meaning that, like their scent, they won't go away just because humans want them to. For all these reasons, they seem symbolically linked with the speaker's depression, which is also highly unpleasant and persistent. Yet their persistence, or fearlessness, might also evoke the qualities the speaker will need to endure his depression.
In general, the "Skunk Hour"—an unpleasant phrase in its own right!—seems to represent a kind of low point, both in the speaker's life and the life of the culture around him. It's the kind of miserable phase one has to grit one's teeth and get through, as if waiting for a foul-smelling cloud to clear.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 37-40: “only skunks, that search / in the moonlight for a bite to eat. / They march on their soles up Main Street: / white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire”
- Lines 45-48: “a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail. / She jabs her wedge-head in a cup / of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, / and will not scare.”
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“Skunk Hour” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Metaphor
Metaphors and similes—some original, others traditional—help the poem vividly render the speaker's state of mind and surroundings.
Some of these metaphors are very subtle in their connotations and allusive echoes. For example, when the speaker describes the "love-cars" in the fifth stanza, he compares them to adjacent ships:
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .This comparison feels appropriate to the poem's setting (a beach town), but it's also eerie and potentially symbolic. Is the speaker imagining these ship-like cars "hull to hull" in port, or sunken onto an undersea "shel[f]"? Either way, the shelf-like graveyard seems to mark a border between life and death in the same way the continental shelf marks the border between land and sea. Love and death, in this image, also seem closely linked—just as they are in the song the speaker is hearing ("Careless Love").
Meanwhile, the way that song figuratively "bleats" from a radio links it back to the heiress's "sheep" in the first stanza. (Bleating in the literal sense describes the noise made by sheep and goats.) In this way, the heartbreak the song expresses seems to encompass not only the speaker/listener but his surrounding community—even the local recluse and her animals. Later, the "moonstruck" eyes of the skunks seem to reinforce the poem's heartsick mood: moonstruck is a traditional metaphor that can mean love-crazed or simply crazed.
Perhaps most importantly, metaphors help communicate the depth of the speaker's suffering. The combination metaphor/simile in lines 32-34 highlights the violence of his emotions:
[...] I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .In other words, he feels as sick and agonized as if he were strangling each of his blood cells, and each of those cells were "sob[bing]." He may also be implying that his depression brings thoughts of self-harm or suicide.
As if that weren't enough, he borrows a metaphor from Satan in John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost: "I myself am hell." In other words, his own mind torments him as much as any divine punishment ever could. He also links his torment with that of Jesus in the Gospels: the "hill's skull" metaphor in line 26 alludes to the site of Jesus's crucifixion (a hill called "Golgotha," which is Hebrew for "skull").
Where metaphor appears in the poem:- Lines 7-9: “Thirsting for / the hierarchic privacy / of Queen Victoria's century,”
- Line 18: “A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.”
- Line 26: “my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;”
- Line 28: “they lay together, hull to hull,”
- Line 29: “where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .”
- Line 31: “A car radio bleats,”
- Lines 32-34: “I hear / my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, / as if my hand were at its throat. . . .”
- Line 35: “I myself am hell;”
- Line 40: “moonstruck eyes' red fire”
- Lines 41-42: “under the chalk-dry and spar spire / of the Trinitarian Church.”
- Line 45: “her column of kittens”
- Line 46: “She jabs her wedge-head”
- Line 47: “drops her ostrich tail,”
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Juxtaposition
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Repetition
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Alliteration
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"Skunk Hour" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Heiress
- Nautilus Island
- Spartan
- Graze
- First selectman
- Her farmer
- Dotage
- Hierarchic
- Queen Victoria's century
- Eyesores
- L. L. Bean
- Nine-knot yawl
- Lobstermen
- Red fox stain
- Fairy decorator
- Fishnet/orange cork
- Awl
- Cobbler's bench
- Tudor Ford
- Hill's skull
- Love-cars
- Shelves on
- "Love, O careless Love"
- Ill-spirit
- Moonstruck
- Spar
- Spire
- Trinitarian Church
- Column
- Swills
- Wedge-head
- Ostrich tail
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(Location in poem: Lines 1-2: “Nautilus Island's hermit / heiress”)
A female inheritor, usually of a large estate or sum of money.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Skunk Hour”
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Form
The poem consists of eight sestets, or six-line stanzas. It doesn't follow a consistent meter or rhyme scheme, but it's not quite free verse, either, since every sestet contains rhymes. In fact, each sestet ends on a full or imperfect rhyme, which helps bring it to a more or less resonant conclusion. (Similarly, all of the sestets conclude with end-stopped lines—though the sixth ends with a dash rather than a period, giving it a little extra tension and momentum as it leads into the following stanza.) Meanwhile, the lines vary considerably in length: the shortest contain three syllables apiece (lines 7, 25), while the longest contains sixteen syllables (line 45).
Overall, the form is an erratic mix of structured and unstructured. This instability gives the poem a somewhat tense, unpredictable quality, perhaps mirroring the speaker's mental instability. Lowell also modeled his form partly on Elizabeth Bishop's "The Armadillo," a debt he acknowledged in his dedication and public comments on the poem. In particular, he took inspiration from Bishop's "short line stanzas" (though "The Armadillo" uses quatrains, not sestets) and the "drifting description" with which she started her poem.
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Meter
The poem never settles into a regular meter, even though it features rhyme and (mostly) short lines. The looseness of its rhythms seems to mimic the unsettled, erratic quality of the speaker's thoughts. After all, this is largely a poem about mental illness.
"Skunk Hour" marked an important shift in Lowell's approach to meter in general. It was the first poem he completed as part of the book that became Life Studies, which, in turn, was his first book to incorporate free verse (and the kind of semi-free verse seen here). It even included a prose section! Previously, Lowell had worked almost exclusively in meter. During this period of his career, however, he sought a style that would reflect the broader changes taking place in American poetry—including the popularity of the Beat Poets, who worked almost entirely in free verse. He also sought a style that would convey the wildness of his own psyche (he battled severe bipolar disorder), as well as the instability and fractures he saw in American society as a whole.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem doesn't feature a regular rhyme scheme, but it does feature plenty of rhymes.
Each sestet ends with a rhyme, whether perfect or imperfect: "cottage"/"village"/"dotage," "all"/"fall," "ill"/"Hill," "fairy"/"marry," "night"/"right," "hear"/"here," "search"/"Church," "air"/"scare." There are many other end rhymes within sestets, too: for example, "privacy"/"century" and "for"/"shore" in the second stanza. There are even some subtle rhymes across sestets—for example, "yawl"/"fall"/"awl" in the third and fourth stanzas.
These rhymes, along with techniques like alliteration and assonance, make the poem sound densely musical despite its lack of meter. At this stage of his career, Robert Lowell was beginning to work in looser and more experimental verse forms, but he often liked to retain the musical qualities of the traditional forms he had worked in previously. Here, rhyme also helps each stanza end on a strong conclusive note, lending particular force to blunt phrases like "My mind's not right" and "will not scare."
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“Skunk Hour” Speaker
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Robert Lowell was a leading figure of the mid-20th-century "confessional" poetry movement. Confessionalist poets exposed and processed personal struggles, traumas, etc. through their writing in a far more direct way than most previous poets had. "Skunk Hour" is a landmark example of this approach. Although its speaker is never named or gendered, readers have typically assumed that the speaker is Lowell himself: the poem is grouped with other autobiographical writing in Life Studies (1959), and its details map closely onto Lowell's experience.
Lowell spent the summer of 1957 in Castine, Maine, which is the implied setting of the poem (it's adjacent to "Blue Hill" and across the water from "Nautilus Island"). He also suffered from bipolar disorder (once known as manic depression), a condition for which he was periodically institutionalized throughout his life. While the speaker never uses the word depression, his anguished statements that "My mind's not right," "I hear / my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell," and "I myself am hell" evoke the kind of severe depressive state Lowell personally experienced.
Of course, some details in the poem may be altered or fictionalized; Lowell claimed, for example, that the lines about "watch[ing] for love-cars" were based on an anecdote about the 19th-century poet Walt Whitman. In general, though, the speaker seems to be a stand-in for Lowell and a spokesman for his very real suffering.
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“Skunk Hour” Setting
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Robert Lowell described the poem's setting as:
a declining Maine sea town. I move from the ocean inland. Sterility howls through the scenery, but I try to give a tone of tolerance, humor, and randomness to the sad prospect.
This town, or "village," is Castine, Maine, which is adjacent to the community of "Blue Hill." Just off the coast of Castine is "Nautilus Island." Lowell spent the summer of 1957 in Castine and wrote the poem that year, so even though the speaker never names the town, its identity is clear from context. Several specific details in the poem, such as the sloping "graveyard" and "Trinitarian Church" (the Trinitarian Congregational Parish, which stands on "Main Street"), correspond to actual features of this town.
The seasonal setting is important, too. The speaker claims that "The season's ill," much as his own psyche is ill. The turn from the "summer" tourist season to the relative desolation of "fall," when the tourists go back home, seems to strike the speaker as emblematic of a deeper decline. He notices that a "millionaire" who used to frequent the town has taken his business, and his social cachet, elsewhere. Implicitly, too, the decorator "brighten[ing] his shop for fall" is making the best of a tough situation. (The population of the real-life Castine had shrunk somewhat since the 19th century, but it was actually climbing in the period when Lowell wrote "Skunk Hour." The village has always had under 1,400 residents.)
Finally, the "Tudor Ford" in line 26 helps pin down the poem's era: it refers to a line of cars produced from 1949 to 1951. This is a poem set in—and, in many ways, a commentary on the culture of—mid-20th-century America.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Skunk Hour”
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Literary Context
Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was one of the major American poets of the mid-20th century. He was a key figure in the confessional poetry movement, which emerged in the U.S. in the 1950s and '60s.
Confessional poetry was deeply personal and often touched on trauma, sexuality, and mental illness. Other famous figures often labeled "confessionalists" include Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath (both of whom studied under Lowell at Boston University), as well as Lowell's friend John Berryman. Lowell himself counted his friend Elizabeth Bishop and the modernist poet William Carlos Williams among his primary artistic influences.
Published in the Partisan Review in 1958, "Skunk Hour" became the final poem of Lowell's 1959 collection Life Studies, one of the most influential books of the confessionalist movement. The poem is dedicated to Bishop and inspired in part by her poem "The Armadillo," which she had dedicated to Lowell. The two poems form part of the longer literary dialogue these writers conducted, mainly in letters, over several decades. On the similarities between the poems, Lowell explained:
The dedication is to Elizabeth Bishop, because rereading her suggested a way of breaking through the shell of my old manner. [...] "Skunk Hour" is modeled on Miss Bishop's "The Armadillo," a much better poem and one I had heard her read and later carried around with me. Both "Skunk Hour" and "The Armadillo" use short line stanzas, start with drifting description, and end with a single animal.
Lowell further commented on the premise and structure of "Skunk Hour":
The first four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or less amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town. I move from the ocean inland. Sterility howls through the scenery, but I try to give a tone of tolerance, humor, and randomness to the sad prospect. The composition drifts, its direction sinks out of sight into the casual, chancy arrangements of nature and decay. Then all comes alive in stanzas V and VI. This is the dark night. I hoped my readers would remember St. John of the Cross's poem [often translated as "Dark Night of the Soul"]. My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan, and agnostical. An Existentialist night.
In other words, Lowell (a lapsed Catholic) hoped to dramatize a modern, secular version of what would once have been understood as a spiritual crisis. Writing in the age of modern psychiatry, Lowell recognizes the crisis as a depressive episode: his "mind," rather than his soul, is "not right."
Historical Context
Confessional poetry was, in part, a response to the many horrors of the 20th century. Events like the two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the Cold War pushed some artists to turn inward, focusing on deeply personal experiences of pain and anxiety. The confessonalists also often wrote in response to the stifling atmosphere of 1950s America, which romanticized domestic life.
Lowell himself lived with bipolar disorder and was institutionalized multiple times throughout his life. "Skunk Hour" is one of a group of poems in Life Studies that addresses Lowell's mental illness, either directly or indirectly. ("Waking in the Blue," which chronicles the poet's time in a mental institution, is another famous example.) This groundbreaking material was somewhat controversial in 1959, especially in the poet's upper-class New England environment. Medical treatments for bipolar disorder improved somewhat during Lowell's lifetime, but they were still in their infancy, making his illness exceptionally difficult to manage for him and those around him.
The "our" in the final stanza likely includes Lowell's wife Elizabeth Hardwick, to whom he was married for 23 years, and their daughter Harriet. The setting here is the family's seasonal home in Maine, in the village of Castine (adjacent to "Blue Hill" and across the water from "Nautilus Island"). Though Hardwick and Lowell were one of the literary power couples of their time, their marriage was tumultuous and shadowed by Lowell's manic phases, which usually included bouts of infidelity. The poet's psychological volatility and rocky love life find their way into the atmosphere of "Skunk Hour," with its references to loneliness, voyeurism, suicidal thoughts, and even violence—this last via the allusion to the blues song "Careless Love."
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More “Skunk Hour” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to Robert Lowell read "Skunk Hour."
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More on "Careless Love" — Some background on the classic song mentioned in "Skunk Hour."
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More About Confessionalism — An introduction to the movement with which Lowell was closely associated.
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"Robert Lowell 101" — An introduction to Lowell's work, courtesy of the Poetry Foundation.
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The Poet's Life and Work — A brief biography of Lowell at Poets.org.
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A Chat with Lowell — Lowell discusses and reads some of his poems in a 1966 documentary.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Robert Lowell
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