"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.