Lowell’s “Life Studies” is just that—a study of his life. It begins with the image of him as a five year old at his grandfather’s house for his Uncle Devereux Winslow’s funeral. The tension and struggle is present even at this young age as he sits “mixing black earth and lime,” with one hand feeling cold and the other warm as he tries to make sense of his family and his place in it. His confusion is reflected in the opposition of words used to describe his grandfather, “…manly, comfortable, / overbearing, disproportioned,” himself as “formal” and “perfection” against “distorting” and “stuffed,” his aunt “thundering” on a “dummy piano,” and his uncle, “animated, hierarchical” against “dying.” The last line “Come winter, / Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color” suggests an image of hope for himself—that the physical, external mixing of “black earth and lime” would somehow manifest as a synthesis of his own internal strife. From here, Lowell walks with the reader showing intimate, vivid pictures of his family history—what his Mother was like, his Father, his Grandparents—to his father’s death, his mother’s death, and then his own private hells with jails (as a conscientious objector), hospitalizations (from manic-depression), and the demise of his marriage. Lowell manages to show the reality of his life, with its chaos and decay, with such a delicate balance of story and gentleness within the prose, that a line of light born of his innocent, but firm questioning and love run like a vein of marble throughout the work. So, how does “Skunk Hour” tie all this family funk together? It takes a heavy shovel to dig through the tone, nuances, and lines, but somehow this skunk stands as a symbol for acceptance and moving on with life.
The first four stanzas of “Skunk Hour” seem to meander through a sleepy, small, coastal town. However, Lowell is playing with the reader with this style. The uneven rhythm of all the lines combined with a rash of enjambment and end stops, at first causes the reader’s eye to amble along, but closer inspection (hint-a second and third reading) of the word choices make one pause—and look at the style from a different perspective. The meandering is a path of decay, death, loss and futility as evidenced by words and phrases like “hermit / heiress,” “Spartan,” “still,” “dotage,” “thirsting,” “eyesores,” “lets them fall,” “season’s ill,” “lost,” “auctioned off,” “red fox stain,” and “no money.” Now the uneven rhythm takes on a different tone, one of heightened chaos, jarring enjambment and jolting end stops. Lowell takes the tension even higher with the use of the present tense in the first, second and fourth stanza juxtaposed with the past tense in the third stanza. There is an old, lonely woman buying properties all around her to further her seclusion from life and letting them fall into disrepair. She longs for a strict, Victorian-insulated past. The one millionaire is bankrupt and lost and now even nature itself has a “red fox stain” on it. Next, there is a gay decorator attempting to sell symbols from the past—that he repaints in a garish orange, knowing that since there is “no money” in it, “he’d rather marry.” Hopelessness is all around in the picture Lowell paints.
The turn comes when Lowell leaves his role of distant on-looker behind and brings the poem to his personal “dark night of the soul,” in stanza five. He uses the past tense in his recollection of this “One dark night, / my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull” and “watched for love-cars” and then switches to the present for the remainder of the poem. Lowell’s caesura after “love-cars” and just before “Lights turned down” adds to the haunting quality to his lonely, searching journey.
The rhythm is still wildly fluctuating in these remaining stanzas, but now there is a rash of end stops with only an occasional enjambment thrown in. This change of style, combined with his use of random, but more consistent rhyming patterns—skull/hull, down/town, cell/hell, eat/street, fire/spire, search/church, pail/tail and air/scare—give the reader the impression of control, a slow building toward some conclusion. Lowell realizes his “mind’s not right,” that love is careless and elusive, that “I myself am hell,” and that “nobody’s there,” meaning God. However, he does see something living with purpose, unafraid and determined. He sees skunks who conquer the night with “moonstruck eyes’ red fire” as they “march on their soles” (pun on souls) past the “chalk-dry” church he no longer believes in. Watching this march, he is able to stand and “breathe the rich air.” According to Native American lore, the skunk “does not get out of the way of any animal—it moves along at its own speed, with its own mind” (Andrews). Lowell seems to make the decision to learn from the skunk. Though the world is full of external and internal pain, there is a way to navigate it and march on. He has finally accepted exactly who he is and where he is. The black earth and lime he sifted as a child have finally blended.
