3. Lowell’s Skunk, Heaney’s Skunk

ROBERT LOWELL, “SKUNK HOUR”

Nautilus Island is a rich man’s island in Penobscot Bay, standing at the head of Castine Harbor. Still privately owned, its forty acres could fit comfortably into Boston Common. Until recently you could rent the island’s main house or Cape Cod cottage by the week—or both, and for about as much as a clerk in a bait shop makes in a year.1 This Maine island is rich in its histories—Indian shell-middens mark its shores, within sight of the ruins of a British gun emplacement captured during the Penobscot Expedition, which led to the most disastrous American naval defeat before Pearl Harbor. (The British had christened the island after HMS Nautilus, a sixteen-gun sloop.) History may trouble a poem like “Skunk Hour” even when the poet chooses not to acknowledge its reach.

The main house sits atop a bluff across the water from Castine, whose cottages rise in orderly rows up the hills from the bay. Starting in 1955, Lowell spent many summers there in his cousin Harriet Winslow’s house on the village green.2

SKUNK HOUR

(For Elizabeth Bishop)

Nautilus Island’s hermit

heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;

her sheep still graze above the sea.

Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer

is first selectman in our village;

she’s in her dotage.

 

Thirsting for

the hierarchic privacy

of Queen Victoria’s century,

she buys up all

the eyesores facing her shore,

and lets them fall.

 

The season’s ill—

we’ve lost our summer millionaire,

who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean

catalogue. His nine-knot yawl

was auctioned off to lobstermen.

A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

 

And now our fairy

decorator brightens his shop for fall;

his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,

orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;

there is no money in his work,

he’d rather marry.

 

One dark night,

my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;

I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,

they lay together, hull to hull,

where the graveyard shelves on the town.…

My mind’s not right.

 

A car radio bleats,

“Love, O careless Love.…” I hear

my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,

as if my hand were at its throat.…

I myself am hell;

nobody’s here—

 

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

under the chalk-dry and spar spire

of the Trinitarian Church.

 

I stand on top

of our back steps and breathe the rich air—

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.3

Any poet may be lucky, but a good poet knows how to take advantage of accident. The Nautilus was also Captain Nemo’s vessel; and something of Verne’s character, of a man set apart from his fellows, survives in this hermit with aesthetic designs. The portrait begins in decay, the long decay of traditions never revitalized, the short decay of the nouveau riche and the tradesmen who prey on them. The poem might itself be a study in faltering convention, with its slapdash, irregular rhyme and straggling unmetrical line—they were certainly a smack at tradition when the poem was published in Partisan Review in 1958 and collected in Life Studies the following year. Unmetered, but not without an ear for meter—the initial nouns and adjectives drum their first syllables, like a Vachel Lindsay tattoo (even the exception, “first selectman,” drums as a phrase). A few months before drafting the poem the year before, Lowell had started to disrupt the niceties of his strict formal style during a West Coast reading tour.4

“Skunk Hour” begins with this superannuated heiress, hidebound, cocksure, senile—Lowell often played the card of his Puritan ancestors, and he played it hard. He recognized that the clannish descendants of the Pilgrim fathers were often inbred and impotent. (“Sterility howls through the scenery,” he said in “On ‘Skunk Hour.’ ”)5 Lacking new blood, they were living on principal. There’s a Tory taint to this ghost of Nautilus Island—the privacy she requires is that of “Queen Victoria’s century,” as if she were the Revolution’s last Tory loyalist. (For an American to refer to the nineteenth century thus is as much a faux pas as for him to bow to a king.) Victims of primogeniture, the younger sons of British gentry had been packed off to the church, the army, or Parliament—her son has taken the vows and risen to the robes, but it’s her farmer who has stepped into politics. His British equal, if he didn’t own a house, would not even have had the right to vote before 1918.

The poem quietly remembers the old antagonisms of the Revolutionary War, which was our first Civil War. About a fifth of the colonials stood with the king, and as many as half didn’t much care for one side or the other.6 The property of Tories was often seized without compensation. (The American Indian was not the only American to lose his land without being paid.) The heiress lives on once disputed ground, proprietor of her own St. Helena, or simply an American whose time has passed her by, like the original owners of the ghostly Manhattan mansions now home to Ralph Lauren and Cartier.7

Yet things endure—she still lives, the sheep still graze. (So close a repetition passes into the small dramas of rhetoric—of surprise, or wonder, or disgust.) The heiress is rich enough to buy up ugly cottages spoiling her view and stare them into ruin, as if they were follies at the end of some duchess’s garden. (Lowell does not say whether these are humble saltboxes or some postwar Down East ugliness.) The real hermit heiress of Nautilus Island was the widow of the geologist John Howard Wilson, whose collections form the core of the Castine museum. Georgia Johnson Wilson died in 1965 at the age of eighty-three.

It takes a particular aesthetic conscience to think a ruin more poetic than clapboard or shingle vernacular architecture—but the heiress is half a Romantic, for any Romantic is a dictator of taste, and she has the money to indulge her outrage over such lèse majesté. “Hierarchic privacy” is a nicely judged phrase—anyone who has walked through a saltbox cottage will know that privacy in such quarters is a vacant wish. The antique ways are gradually falling into desuetude; and this old dotard, in her dotage, lives in Spartan parsimony—a New England hardiness taken to foolhardy extremes, or simple penny-pinching. (She’s living in her cottage, then, not the main house—down-at-heels English lords have been known to do the same.) Does she show the sturdy character of the old Johnny Cake, the sharp practice of the Yankee peddler, or is she simply a nut who’s going to freeze to death one December?

The true New Englander stays in his godforsaken port past Labor Day, when summer visitors flee to the cities. (Not twenty years after Life Studies, down the coast in Provincetown, most of the shops still shuttered themselves for winter, and many of the residents went on welfare.) The privilege of old money, however, sits ill with the town’s economic collapse. The “summer millionaire” in his L. L. Bean gear has vanished, his yawl auctioned off to the local lobstermen, his wealth as fleeting as the Maine summer. He’s gone bankrupt, or perhaps just lost interest in playing the Penobscot yachtsman—“We lost” makes his absence seem the town’s fault. Lowell’s use of colloquial phrase was always acute.

A yawl is a two-masted vessel, with a mizzenmast aft of the main—nine knots is extremely fast for such a boat. Perhaps Lowell knew that originally this was a fishing-boat rig, so there’s some justice to its defeated afterlife, sweeping busily, bossily, about the harbor to check the traps. New England lobstermen are extremely territorial—if you come from a neighboring town, you can lay lobster pots only at the risk of life and property. The locals have had their poetic vengeance upon the rich, but it’s thin compensation. The bay’s lobsters and clams, as well as the fish in the Georges Banks (fished out a few decades later), may sustain a subsistence economy; but already half a century ago such precarious towns could not thrive without summer visitors.

These early stanzas mark the derangements of order now threatening the community. Even nature is at odds with itself, some sort of infective stain covering Blue Hill. (The landmark, like the village named for it, lies on the other side of the peninsula from Castine.) Lowell later admitted that this was only the “rusty reddish color of autumn,”8 but his language gives it a pathological cast.

The last of the three exemplary portraits that open the poem, unremarkable at the time, is now the most controversial. You can say a lot of bad things about Lowell’s phrase “fairy decorator” before you come to any good ones. The decorator was a type, as was the homosexual hairdresser. Lowell was not alone then in thinking homosexuality a perversion of instinct—American psychiatry agreed with him. Such language would be vile now, as it was vile then; but the critic must examine the reach and intention of 1957. The casual aspersions on the decorator’s manhood come from a speaker himself unmanned, but then the vile is often an assertion of virility. There is something apart from an expression of beleaguered masculinity, whether Lowell heard it or not: the decorator is the merchant Puck of this town, with his powers of metamorphosis. What is the speaker’s hope but to be transformed? Dividing the phrase “fairy / decorator” releases the folklore locked within—following so closely the woodland of Blue Hill, the phrase quietly suggests that even the local supernatural figures have fallen on hard times. The fairies have had to move out of the woods and set up shop.

The use of slang always carries a risk. During the Revolution, the British sang, “Yankee Doodle came to town / Upon a little pony, / He stuck a feather in his hat / And called it macaroni.”9 We no longer hear the slander in “Yankee Doodle”—“Yankee,” though of uncertain origin, was derogatory, and a doodle was a fool. “Macaroni” now requires a footnote (he was a London dandy—a hayseed with a feather in his hat is no macaroni), while the casual slurs of Eliot’s “squatting Jew,” or Pound’s “kike,” or Marianne Moore’s “coon,” or Wallace Stevens’s “nigger,” or William Carlos Williams’s “wop” are now taboo. Yet all were used in poems or letters as if perfectly natural. We can convict the poet only if we also convict the time, because the poet is rarely better than his time. Only his poems may be, by grace or imagination.

The decorator trades in the cobbler’s bench and fisherman’s net, the cast-off kit of workmen—the honesties of labor have been perverted into the dishonesties of kitsch. It’s another sign of decay. (Many restaurants and fish markets required a nautical theme, and thousands of middle-class homes once used a cobbler’s bench as a coffee table.) To decorate a room with such things makes them battle trophies—the modern world, having triumphed over hand labor, now sentimentalizes it. Yet the decorator’s shop is failing, the local businesses and middle-class housewives either sated by such junk or deserting the rundown port. That the decorator would prefer marriage is a further comic reversal, a sour judgment on interior decoration or marriage, it’s hard to say which—though perhaps, like many in that day, Lowell believed the man was homosexual by choice.

The poem has a long opening—it takes its time, lingering over the setting until the reader might think that setting is all. At its midpoint, the poem shifts from exterior to interior, from ill landscape to the ill landscape within, and particularly from our village, our summer millionaire, our fairy decorator to my Tudor Ford, my ill-spirit, my mind’s not right. Lowell claimed that the poem “was written backward, first the last two stanzas, I think, and then the next-to-last two,”10 which suggests, not the crooked path of imagination (many a tale is best told backward, and many a tail flourished in retreat), but a fruitful way of fixing the barren ground of private life in local landscape and local economy. The stanzas on the private life alone, he must have realized, would lack contrast and setting.

One dark night,

my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull,

I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,

they lay together, hull to hull,

where the graveyard shelves on the town.…

My mind’s not right.

The bleak night, the lone pilgrim climbing the hill—we are at the opening of the Inferno, transposed to the day of the internal combustion engine, that devil’s device. (Blake’s “dark satanic mills,” steam powered or water driven, were never far off in New England.) The Tudor Ford was a jaunty lightweight sedan introduced in the twenties, but by the fifties it had become a stolid and ugly heap. The lovelorn speaker probably drives this bulky later version. Sullen and low-browed, it’s a car for private brooding, for lurking in the shadows, a car that might develop an unhealthy interest in love-cars. The model had two doors—there’s a levity to the pun, a levity masking a seriousness, since a royal dynasty has been reduced to selling automobiles, another sign of that fallen world, or perhaps merely a more democratic one, because a Yankee independence of spirit infuses the poem, even if that spirit must live on scraps. Perhaps such uses of modern trade are no worse than the royal warrants dynasties since the Plantagenets have granted their favorite shopkeepers. (Current holders include Bacardi for vermouth, Kellogg’s for cereal, Kimberley-Clark for toilet paper, Xerox for photocopiers—and Ford for cars.) Ford also offered a Fordor—a groaner of a pun even more excruciating, if possible.

The descent the poem will shortly make into the speaker’s hell is for a moment suspended. He watches his cars the way Dante contemplated his sinners. (We have perhaps happened upon the second circle, where the poet watched the whirlwind that bore the lovers Paolo and Francesca.) The voyeurism is both the wounded soul’s recognition of unhappiness and an attempt to reach the normal life availing elsewhere. The allusions are more than usually impacted here—the “hill’s skull” invokes the horror of Golgotha, while hinting that we are delving into a man’s skull, that is, his psychology. (The later incarnation, some might say, of that serious Victorian science, phrenology.) On this ground of death, the “graveyard shelves on the town”—as if the crucified thieves of Golgotha have been buried beneath slate slabs or granite crosses.

Those love-cars lie in happy, fructifying, carnal opposition to the corpses below. The speaker has been drawn to the local lover’s lane, a retreat that in small towns of small cottages is nearly a necessity. Even at the point of admitting madness, he drolly suggests (or the language allows) that the cars themselves are mating, “lights turned down” romantically—they “lay together” in the old phrase, “hull to hull” in Lowell’s new one. Couples don’t go to such places if they’re married, at least to each other—besides, in such a town everyone knows your car. Here the pervert is watching the illicit. (Peeping Tom, no criminal in common law, was usually prosecuted merely for disorderly conduct.) Sex in American cars deserves a longer disquisition—such things were more comfortable when the back seat of Detroit’s sedans was about the size of a hotel bed.

Lowell’s secrets were not always his own—he took from his life what he required and faked the rest. He admitted that the lead soldiers from Dijon in his memoir “91 Revere Street” were a counterfeit Flaubertian detail, so far as Dijon was concerned. (The particulars look stolid and exact: “hand-painted solid lead soldiers made to order in Dijon, France.”)11 Lowell found the germ of his lover’s lane in Logan Pearsall Smith’s autobiography, Unforgotten Years. When Whitman lodged for a month at the Smith family home in Germantown, northwest of Philadelphia, Smith’s father used to take the poet on afternoon excursions through Fairmount Park, where they would “drive as close as they could behind buggies in which pairs of lovers were seated, and observe the degree of slope towards each other, or ‘buggy-angle,’ as they called it, of these couples.” Seeing the lovers embrace made the men cheerful. (Whitman, in Smith’s rhetorical gassiness, “ever honored that joy-giving power of nature symbolized under the name of Venus.”)12 Not prurient or salacious voyeurism, then, but the warmth of watching a private happiness.

The poem keeps close its use of the source, but the desperation for healing and renewal does not entirely erase the degradation of the act. If there are losses the poem cannot admit, that partially accounts for its power. All Lowell’s adulthood, he suffered violent attacks of manic depression—his biography taints these lines. Here, as so rarely in life, he seems alert to the onset of the symptoms (present-tense poems are always retrospective, one way or another). If there’s a healthy voyeurism here, tinged with innocence, there’s an unhealthy one tinged with guilt, or shame, or perhaps envy.

The reader wants to pass through the veils of language to the naked life, to Lowell’s naked life—that is the intimacy poetry promises, even if the life of the poet is a fiction. Poetry offers the experience of private revelation, of secrets whispered and longings blurted out (I am avoiding the word confession). To go no further back than the Elizabethans, think of Wyatt. Think of Donne. Critics often feel obliged to treat poems as dispassionate fictional acts, as the New Critics preferred, even if on occasion biography drags us closer to the meaning. We do not have to think the poet on oath or take the revelations of poetry on trust. If to scour the art for clues to the life compounds one fiction with another (poetry is autobiography’s fiction), refusal to bring the life to bear can be willful blindness.

“My mind’s not right”—the phrase lies in the shock of saying, as well as in what it fails to say. Lowell no doubt means only not well or half mad; but, if a mind is not right, it’s wrong. Wrongness of mind is the condition of evil. Dramatically, this recognition scene limits the damage of the speaker’s voyeurism, assuaging the reader’s unease. Yet there are no cars on this bleak night.

A car-radio bleats,

“Love, O careless Love.…” I hear

my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,

as if my hand were at its throat.…

I myself am hell;

nobody’s here—

A car radio—but it must be the speaker’s car if nobody else lurks there (unless he’s suffering auditory hallucinations, a symptom of psychosis). “Careless Love” is an old blues standard (the line usually rendered as “Love, O Love, O careless Love”—the falling rhythm of the poem’s opening). Bessie Smith sang a hypnotic version in 1925; but Lowell was probably thinking of the B-side recorded by Fats Domino in 1951, likely still played on AM radio. (FM radios appeared in cars in 1952, but they were very rare until the 1960s.) The echo of “car” in “careless Love” might be whimsical if it weren’t pathetic and sad. “Bleats,” the echo of those island sheep, could be here merely for the rhyme, among the most off-kilter in the poem; but it suggests pathos heard without sympathy, as if the speaker were dismissive of such desires, even his own—dismissive, or scathingly critical. “Bleat” and “throat” lie near each other only when the hand at the throat bears the sacrificial knife.

The ill-spirit is a bullying reminder of infection and contagion, yet the poem is rich enough in its references for other meanings to sidle in. A man’s nature was once supposed to be dominated and influenced by two spirits, a good genius and a bad. (The OED reminds us that Christians called them angels, as in Lincoln’s phrase, the “better angels of our nature.”) An “ill-spirit” is not the same as an ill spirit. Lowell’s hyphen dampens the primary meaning, a spirit itself unwell, sick down to the body’s very cells—it’s a terrifying diagnosis of the early stages of an attack. The fever of illness has become moral pathology. The “ill-spirit” might therefore be taken, though this pushes the meaning a little hard, as a bad genius now inhabiting the whole body. (If we let biography intrude at all, we should not forget that Lowell was more than once accused of choking his lovers—“my hand … at its throat.”)13 The poet who rhymes “blood cell” with “hell” must allow that cell some hint of imprisonment, a pun often passing off lightly the stain of seriousness.

What else is that guilt composed of? When Lowell’s mania came on, there was usually a girl involved. Careless love, the love-cars—perhaps the speaker is thinking of adultery. We are on thin ground here, because the only mention of a wife lies in “our” back steps, and therefore perhaps the other “our”s as well (a wife was more evident in earlier drafts)14—it requires a leap of faith into the faithless. Yet without the “love attack,” as it once was called, the symptoms seem incomplete.

The first half must now be reinterpreted by what we learn of the speaker’s motives and state of mind. With “My mind’s not right,” Lowell becomes—as so rarely in poetry, that medium of confession and denial—an unreliable narrator. (“My Last Duchess” is perhaps the most famous example.) Everything the speaker has said about the town’s infections and decay must be reexamined—as with the Devil, nothing can be taken on trust, not even that the speaker’s revelation contains an apology for a view morbid or skewed.

“I myself am hell” was immediately recognized as Lowell’s nod to Milton’s Satan: “Which way I fly is hell; my self am hell.”15 In that deepest hell of self, one may be imprisoned without bars, in a land so vast there are no walls: the prison cell, like the monk’s cell, is insufficiently large; but there are worlds whose prison is insufficiently small. Milton’s idea was not Milton’s alone. In Religio Medici (1643), Thomas Browne wrote, “The Heart of Man is the place the Devils Dwell in; I feel sometimes a Hell within my self ”; Marlowe’s Faustus earlier lamented, “But where we are is hell, / And where hell is there must we ever be.”16 Worse, even in the lowest hell, says Milton’s Satan, there is always hell even lower, “To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.”17 Milton’s context, however, should not be forgotten. The fallen angel speaks in the dark of his greatest despair (akin to the depressive gloom of Lowell’s speaker), just before he spies Eden, the Eden that gives him purpose:

All hope excluded thus, behold in stead

Of us outcast, exiled, his new delight,

Mankind created, and for him this world.

So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,

Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost;

Evil be thou my good.18

We would take the allusion too far to think that in “Skunk Hour” the speaker’s longing will become Man’s fall, but the love-cars are a hope withdrawn. “My mind’s not right” is what Satan cannot say; it is Satan without hubris—that is what terrifies about Lowell. He has fallen even lower than Satan, the mark of his humanity also the zero point of absolute negation. The pathos of the town’s fall is that for centuries it thrived—once it did not need tourists. If all good to the speaker has been lost, where in this Paradise Lost along the Maine coast can some evil be a good?

“Nobody’s here” is not, not just, the recognition that the graveyard is empty of cars this bleak night, but that the speaker himself is no one and nothing. We have come at last to the dark night of the soul, the night of St. John of the Cross, as Lowell assumed the reader would know. (Did he also hope the reader would remember that, when St. John wrote, he lay in prison, having offended his own order, the Carmelites?) We have arrived at the “skunk hour,” the hour of moral scavenging, of the dark scrabble for survival. Here at last the poem fills with life, if only blind animal life, for the lines on the cemetery do not end with a period:

nobody’s here—

 

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

under the chalk-dry and spar spire

of the Trinitarian Church.

The march of the skunks would usually take place in high summer, and Lowell has made a hellish burlesque of the town’s nineteenth-century traditions. Summer, the high-school band marching up Main under the white stripes—the red and white stripes—of the American flag: the skunks are making bleak mockery of the Fourth of July parade (in low light, red and white read as black and white). The connections are perhaps subconscious, though Lowell was a student of American holiday and ceremony, as any poet would be who had written “Thanksgiving’s Over,” “Christmas in Black Rock,” “Memorial Day”; yet the skunks celebrate that Yankee independence Lowell seeks to recover. (Lowell provided his own sharply political observation of the Castine parade in “Fourth of July in Maine,” addressed in heroic couplets to Harriet Winslow.) Independence Day marks that founding rupture from British manners, British royalty, when a man’s destiny became democratically his own. It would be fanciful to hear star in that spar spire, not just in the unused echo of rhyme, but in the church that began with magicians following a star—the comet of Bethlehem, as Origen had it.

“Nobody’s here”—the line would fit slyly into book 9 of the Odyssey, where Polyphemus’s vengeance is frustrated by the cleverest pun in Homer. (If we reach for the virtue of accident, the name of the captain of the Nautilus meant Nobody, too.) The syntax slips here—Lowell was no master of punctuation, and his publishers seemed often in fear of him, elsewhere in his poems allowing misspellings like Chevie or placques to pass without correction.19 (As a young man, Lowell had written his former teacher Richard Eberhart, “Mis-spelling seldom obscures meaning.”)20 The comma after “skunks” should not lie before a restrictive relative; otherwise we’re likely to read “that” as not pronoun but adjective, which would make the syntax oddly elliptical: the only inhabitants of the cemetery are not “skunks that search in the moonlight” but only (1) skunks and (2) a particular “search / in the moonlight.” The comma makes a difference, the difference of confusion. Dropping it would have been clearer—yet there’s a more cunning ambiguity. If nobody’s at the cemetery, only skunks, then this speaker has already made common cause. What is a voyeur but a moral skunk? The judgment would be harsher had Lowell not written in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop, “I’m a skunk in the poem.”21

Except during breeding season, the skunk is solitary and nocturnal (more accurately, crepuscular), as well as omnivorous. Insects, rodents, fruit, grubs, even bees—skunks have learned to take their menu broadly. No doubt that was the menu in Paradise, where everything must have been delicious, not just the apples. The beast is an old creature in the mythologies of this historical ground—the name derives from an Algonquin word meaning, in the local Abenaki dialect, the urinating fox.22

Lowell lightens the scavenging for survival with the cheerfully colloquial “bite to eat,” as if the skunks, foraging in that lonely graveyard, their eyes red as a devil’s, might have walked into a diner and ordered the blue-plate special. The poem has collapsed local geography into rough Aristotelian unity: the sharply angled Trinitarian Church sits sharply upon Main Street, almost half a mile away from the graveyard; Lowell’s summer house lies between them to one side of the green. The mast-like spire, stiffly visible from Nautilus Island, rises as if from a ship in drydock or washed up ashore. (The ship’s-keel roofs of medieval churches suggest how closely allied to shipbuilding were the aspirations of theology—and the beginning of Christ’s mission.) Lowell doesn’t press the point. He merely reveals it (adjectives expose even as they restrict), just as the dry chalk might serve for the desiccation of religion. Yet the church quietly embodies that Yankee spirit. It’s a Congregational church, whose congregation alone determines the religious practice and doctrine. (Harvard and Yale were founded as Congregational institutions.)

Lowell changed his religious principles so often that it’s difficult to know whether the dry spire represents a Catholic’s view of Protestants, an Episcopalian’s view of Protestant American sects, or a doubter’s view of the false promise of the whole Christian enterprise. In the fall of 1955, before the poem was written, Lowell left the Catholic Church (a convert, he had an on-again, off-again dalliance with the faith) to rejoin the Episcopalians;23 but the poem seems skeptical of the grace offered and the salvation vouchsafed.

The skunks make three appearances: scrounging at the cemetery; marching up Main Street, away from the harbor; and swilling from the garbage pail near the speaker’s back steps—they’re not the same skunks, but probably three different groups forced into what seems one appearance. Their dinnerware must be a small pail for kitchen waste, not the taller trash-can a skunk would find difficult to tip over. Why has the speaker gone out to the steps? We don’t need a reason, because the poem doesn’t require it; if we wanted one, it would be to empty the day’s garbage or because he heard the skunk disturb the metal lid of the pail—or perhaps in despair, merely to escape the house for a moment. When the mother skunk will not scare, it must be the speaker who can’t shoo her. The physical geography doesn’t matter—when a poem makes a dream landscape, it’s not a fault of but a device of imagination.

Here the poem turns toward the simplicities of the animal world, the human one having proven so tainted with compromising economies. Nature may be red in tooth and claw (a practical Marxist lives off the waste of capitalism—the skunk is successful in a way the decorator is not), but nature reduces complex psychologies to instinct. The mother skunk’s fearlessness has been bred into a long Darwinian order—her primal drive is to feed her kits.

I stand on top

of our back steps and breathe the rich air—

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.

The skunk is a fierce, well-armed matriarch, like Lowell’s mother. That’s a very different kind of love from what the speaker seeks—yet the moral taken is of facing up to fear, not being scared or scared off. Where Lowell’s family drama forces its way into his early poems, the organization almost always requires a rejection of the father—Lowell famously knocked his father down, Oedipal fashion, over the poet’s college romance.24 His mother is the more Protean figure, both the castrating Medea of “91 Revere Street” and the domineering yet almost admirable monster of “Sailing Home from Rapallo.” Lowell’s daughter Harriet was six months old when he began “Skunk Hour,” and a parent’s obligations may lie in the background. She was named for the Winslow cousin who eventually willed Lowell’s wife the Castine house.25 Here, on “our” back steps, presumably with the baby Harriet asleep or almost asleep indoors, the young father, the man seeking love-cars, has quietly been recalled to the burdens of home. A man must face his responsibilities.

Why did he need to be recalled? In early August 1957 at Castine, Lowell began to spiral out of control. He later apologized for his “frenzied behavior” and his “slip into the monstrous.”26 He had been particularly drawn to the company of one summer visitor, an old friend, a poet to whom he had almost proposed, which he called “the might have been.”27 The poet was Elizabeth Bishop, to whom he dedicated “Skunk Hour.”28 Even more than “Water,” it is his great love poem to her. If she is the absent love, the careless love missing from his symptoms, it explains what he wrote after she fled from Castine: “My disease, alas, gives one (during its seizures) a headless heart.”29 The dark night of the soul is love, not faith. Lowell must have believed, against all evidence (recall his portrait of the fairy decorator), that she could choose not to be homosexual—but then lovers believe so many silly things.

Bishop’s “The Armadillo” was published in the New Yorker on June 22, 1957, weeks before her visit. (He’d seen the poem with others she’d recently sent and called it “one of your three or four very best.”)30 He wrote her in September that he’d started half-a-dozen poems, one “called ‘Skunk Hour,’ not in your style yet indebted a little to your ‘Armadillo.’ ”31 In a letter the next spring, he confessed that he’d compared the two poems in class “and ended up feeling a petty plagiarist.”32 Her dedication of the poem to him came only when she published Questions of Travel in 1965 (“since you have liked it,” she wrote).33 He’d taken to carrying her poem in his wallet.34

Lowell struggled to bring “Skunk Hour” to term. He attempted to crowd the material into stanzas of various sizes, titling some drafts “For Elizabeth Bishop.” In one untitled draft that survives among his papers at Harvard, two seven-line stanzas form what might be called an accidental sonnet. The pentameter galumphs along unconvincingly, but in this draft two people—obviously Lowell and Bishop—take a moonlit drive up a hill’s “bald skull above the bay / To watch the moon whose mind is not quite right.” The poem ends with the moon “above the chalk-white and pure spire of a Maine church.”35 Such false starts reveal how cunningly, compellingly, Lowell shuffled his images—yet he still reverted to staid pentameter months after the March trip to the West Coast in which he learned “to add extra syllables to a line to make it clearer and more colloquial.”36 In another precursor to “Skunk Hour,” titled “Inspiration” and far closer to the later poem, the poet is the one who finds “there is no money in this work, / You have to love it.”37

Could the frightening, unfrightened matriarch not be an animal incarnation of his wife, now restored to dominance? That would give a new reading to “will not scare,” because it was Elizabeth Hardwick who bore the burden of Lowell’s bouts of mania, Lizzie who managed his illness and braved the amours that accompanied it. That does not preclude the skunk from being the manifestation of both mother and wife, something that would have scared either—or merely the animal other, that familiar of a world whose arguments are simple.

The air is rich, even if the town is not—rich with the stink of skunk and garbage. (We talk of someone making a stink.) The skunk’s perfume is acrid, foul, so there is some irony when the rotten speaker revels in the rotten odor of it. (Encountering a skunk on his voyage on the Beagle, Darwin wrote, “Whatever is once polluted by it is forever useless.”)38 Whether in decaying garbage or on the skunk’s ripe scent, life itself rises from the mulch of rot, which is another way evil can be made good.

Through Lowell’s enjambment, the speaker stands on top, like a conqueror—but only “on top / of our back steps.” (The poem is full of short rises and dying falls—the heiress … in her dotage, the millionaire … whose yacht is sold. Even the “hermit / heiress” contains its small drama of opposition.) The poem has passed from the disease of the world to the disease within, from the impoverished economy to salvation and renewal—and without an hour wasted in psychiatry. In later terms, the poem might be called self-medicating.

In coastal towns, skunks like to breed under the beach houses raised on wooden pilings. Skunks mate in March and give birth in May. The kits leave the mother by the end of July. Lowell’s hellish parade should be held at midsummer, not when the leaves are turning. If it’s not poetic license, it’s another way in which the time is not right. (Henry Erhard, animal-control officer of Castine, has confirmed that fall is too late to see such things there.)39 The bestial world knows how to survive on garbage—salvation lies in the scrabble of animal existence, not the civilized tally of losses that mark the first four stanzas, like a town corporation’s annual report of profit and loss. If there’s a death instinct, the skunk represents the life instinct—protective, feral, cunning, indomitable, incapable of bleating in self-pity, “Love, O careless Love.”

Lowell told Bishop that “Skunk Hour” was an homage to “The Armadillo”; but the drive toward raw survival is closer to another poem in Questions of Travel (1965), “The Burglar of Babylon,” where slums overrun the lush hills of Rio. Bishop’s “fearful stain” seems to lurk behind the “red-fox stain that covers Blue Hill”; her “hill of the Skeleton,” the “hill’s skull”; her slums overrunning the hills, the Maine port’s rundown cottages. Alas, she did not write the poem until 1963.40 Lowell saw it in the New Yorker the following year. It’s not impossible that “Skunk Hour” lies unconsciously behind her stray details—the themes fretted both poets.

“Skunk Hour” spirals inward like the nautilus shell, from the demented heiress’s willed Spartan life to the bare subsistence of the scavenger—without the moral implicit in the close, the poem would be a portrait of one barrenness after another. Yet something would be lost if Lowell’s chalk-dry humor were not recognized. Ian Hamilton, his biographer, is acute in calling the opening stanzas “lightish social comedy.”41 Lowell probably meant the “fairy decorator” to be teasing, not repulsive, even if the character is excruciating now—like every Hollywood scene with an eye-rolling black maid or cook. It presses the accidental symbol too sharply to note that the nautilus’s back-curving corridor maps Dante’s spiraling descent through the malebolge. Still, the heiress must be living on investments, the millionaire is not what he seems (he should wear not L. L. Bean togs but the lead cloak of the hypocrite)—Lowell’s thieves’ row of characters might be found in the seventh circle (usury and sodomy) and the eighth (fraud). There’s no specific place for voyeurs in the Inferno, but they might be cast in the eighth circle among the sowers of discord, their wounds torn open even as they heal. Milton’s lines in the first book of Paradise Lost might trouble the speaker here: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”42 And the skunk? The skunk is Lowell’s Virgil, leading him out of that dark night—to the luxury of Purgatory, if no higher.

SEAMUS HEANEY, “THE SKUNK”

Seamus Heaney used to tell of the day Lowell was driven through Ireland in Michael Longley’s rattletrap car. After a long ride, the American turned to the driver and said, “Michael’s car is a bundle of wounds.” With Heaney’s accent, that became “wooooonds.” If Life Studies (1959) is a collection of wounds, Field Work (1979) two decades later is a collection of healings. “The Skunk” is not a direct answer to Lowell, because only a parody is a cross-examination; but Heaney’s poem lives in the shadow of “Skunk Hour.” The ways in which it deviates are the ways in which the later poem exists in quiet and helpless counterargument.

“The Skunk” begins with one of those small patents we call style. Heaney sounds his descriptions the way hard taps secure a nail, loving his adjectives by threes and even fours. He sidles toward description as if each modification were a hypothesis:

THE SKUNK

Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble

At a funeral mass, the skunk’s tail

Paraded the skunk. Night after night

I expected her like a visitor.

 

The refrigerator whinnied into silence.

My desk light softened beyond the verandah.

Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.

I began to be tense as a voyeur.

 

After eleven years I was composing

Love-letters again, broaching the word “wife”

Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel

Had mutated into the night earth and air

 

Of California. The beautiful, useless

Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.

The aftermath of a mouthful of wine

Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.

 

And there she was, the intent and glamorous,

Ordinary, mysterious skunk,

Mythologized, demythologized,

Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.

 

It all came back to me last night, stirred

By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,

Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer

For the black plunge-line nightdress.43

The long description in the opening lines by a distance precedes the thing described—the adjectives parade the skunk. The syntax is unusually disengaged; one could start a pub brawl over where the modifiers shift to the vestment—up is the tail, but the transformation could occur on any adjective following. There is an additive quality to adjectives, at least until there’s a subtractive one, since more do not necessarily cinch a description more tightly—at a certain point the noun begins to slip away. (A mathematics of poetry has not yet been developed, but such frenzied compiling might be like a parabola approaching a directrix—it comes near, then flees.)

The poem starts arrière-guard, with the tail—it’s a poem about tails, and a tale about a tail. Black with a long high-tau cross in front (the capital Greek tau [“T”]), the crosspiece so close to the chin only the long vertical stripe may be noticed, a funeral chasuble may be richly figured, which the figure of “damasked” requires. The metaphor confers on the skunk a certain Crusader antiquity (the original damasks were woven in Damascus) as well as richness: in Epicoene, Ben Jonson mentions a damask tablecloth that cost eighteen pounds.44 At about that date, by one source, ten thousand bricks cost just under seven shillings. You could have bought more than half-a-million bricks with eighteen pounds, enough for a wall two miles long and six feet high.45

What has died here? What are the obsequies for? The life of the poem begins with this funeral; but the skunk has come before, night after night, like a recurrent dream. Expectation always lives at the heart of arousal. One of the poem’s acts of graciousness and confidence is the way it winds toward its subject with a certain leisure (like a nautilus shell, perhaps)—Lowell’s poem is looking for a way out, Heaney’s a way in, because his is constructed like a mystery. In a quiet way, the poem’s blacks and whites are indebted to film noir. He sets the scene: the desk light cast dimly upon the verandah (in California, we shortly learn); the refrigerator shuddering into silence, the oranges ripening or ripened on the tree—but the refrigerator whinnies like an animal, the oranges loom. (Is it intensification or merely slack repetition to be told that the oranges hang on an orange tree?) With a certain abruptness, however, the speaker announces, “I began to be tense as a voyeur.” The diagnosis may be as much a mystery to him as it is to the reader—it comes as an unexpected shock. It’s like Heaney to make something so sinless appear a sin—perhaps, in the words of a famous American peanut-farmer, it’s only a sin in the heart.46

Both poems revel in their orders, Lowell’s built into sestets and Heaney’s dragged into quatrains. (The poems have a catch-as-catch-can feeling without being formless—that’s part of their charm.) The rhyme scheme of “Skunk Hour” is ragged, irregular, lines written in the ghost of meter. “The Skunk” travels through a more cocksure free-verse, with occasional rhymes by chance or fancy (visitor / voyeur / air end the first three stanzas, but useless is a long dozen lines from nightdress). The stray acknowledgments to “Skunk Hour”—the funeral mass that echoes the cemetery scene, the paraded tail that remembers the march up Main, the skunk itself—have prepared the comic incarnation of Lowell’s voyeur. Yet where the American’s admission, midway through the poem, clarifies the actor and act, in Heaney we are a distance from understanding. Lowell has things he can’t say, Heaney things he won’t, not yet—the latter is a contrivance, but literary contrivance must be repaid in dramatic effect.

The next stanza begins with an apparent irrelevance:

After eleven years I was composing

Love-letters again, broaching the word “wife”

Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel

Had mutated into the night earth and air

 

Of California.

These are plain facts, not so plainly. Here the complicated construction of time in the poem is made half clear. The husband is away in California, away long enough to find himself projecting his longing onto passing scavengers. He’s writing his wife love letters—if the poem is lodged in biography, Heaney went to Berkeley as a visiting professor in 1976, this time without his family, unlike his visit a few years before. Eleven years. Heaney married Marie Devlin in 1965,47 so those letters take him back to the last days of courtship.

Airmail letters, at thirty-one cents an ounce, would have taken a week to arrive in Ireland.48 In those days, overseas phone calls cost a minimum of $9.60 per three-minute block49 and were therefore usually avoided (that would be approximately $40 now); but writing letters from such a distance creates a curious disconnection, answers often crossing new questions in the mails. The last days of courtship are very different from the middle days of marriage, the former marked by what wedlock sometimes lacks—anticipation. The poet has been thrown back on feelings buried in the gratifications of marriage, gratifications perhaps grown slightly common. The letters make him feel again like that young suitor, the guilt all the stronger if he finds himself looking forward to those nightly visits. It’s emotional adultery, when he might instead be longing for his absent wife.

A poem can survive mysteries never quite explained, and in these lines perhaps some of the mystery is a mystery still. The lovelorn speaker broaches the cask of the word “wife” as if it had long been in storage—its vintage has been aging peacefully (wines mature in oak before they’re bottled). The olfactory ripeness of the poem will shortly appear, but at this moment we should not ignore the carnal desires implied. Broaching a subject is a softened figure of the original meaning of piercing or stabbing (to broach a topic now is merely to introduce it). Heaney likely uses broach because you can broach both a cask and an idea (Pepys broached a “vessel of ale,” OED). European dictionaries of the day—French, Spanish, even Swedish—each had a term for “to broach a virgin,” and “tap a virgin” was the English equivalent.50 Only the ghost of violation and release remains, but it’s hard to ignore the sexual slang hovering behind—bung-hole has long been a synonym for anus.51

That much is clear, but to broach the “word ‘wife’ / … as if its slender vowel / Had mutated into the night and air // of California” somewhat defeats me. The “slender vowel” must be “i” or “I.” The word “wife” is a cask breached or broached; its scent floats upon the California air, the way a woman’s scent, or her perfume, rises off a pillow when she’s gone. She is perhaps the “I” upon the air. That may be all—but there may be something further, some sense where the letter “i” comes into play, and where the “spelling” of absence in the next lines is more than wordplay (“love-letters” could be another pun):

The beautiful, useless

Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.

The aftermath of a mouthful of wine

Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.

Wife is perhaps not a word he used in the intimacy of home—writing it from a distance would have a special frisson—and therefore spectral presence. (Something spelled is also spelled out.) He might mean, “The self I am only when thinking of you as my wife suddenly appeared in California” or “I began to feel detached and disembodied, thinking of you so far away.” “I had a whole house to myself for the term,” Heaney later recalled. “[The owners had] told me to look out for this skunk and her family and, if they appeared, to keep very still.… To this day I associate that visitation with the erotic.”52

Sensuality, for Heaney, is sometimes introduced as scent or taste. Is there no sexual hint in “Oysters”: “My tongue was a filling estuary … / As I tasted the salty Pleiades.… / I saw the frond-lipped, bring-stung / Glut of privilege”? Heaney may be the most olfactory poet since Shakespeare, whose works contain some thirty references to “perfume” and almost ninety to “smell” and its close relations (though not quite twenty to “stink”). The alien scent of eucalyptus reminds the speaker of all the losses around him, spelling in a different way, like Circe. Replacements invoke absence, and fail to replace.

The eucalyptus is itself a foreign invader, introduced to California by Australian Forty-Niners, no doubt as a reminder of home, unless the seeds were caught in their trouser cuffs. Berkeley, like Lowell’s Castine, rises on hills above a bay, San Francisco Bay. During the Gold Rush, San Francisco expanded with breathless speed—arriving ships lost their entire crews and even their captains to the mines. Scores of abandoned vessels lay at anchor. Some became hotels or warehouses; others were sunk as foundations for new buildings, land was so valuable. The city gradually crawled out into the bay. What became San Francisco’s Barbary Coast was originally called Sydneytown, and the inhabitants—many of them freed prisoners or ticket-of-leave men, criminal, violent, and rowdy—were called Sydney Ducks. The orange, too, is foreign to the Americas, introduced to the Caribbean by Columbus and to Florida by Ponce de León. The speaker may be unaware of their history, but these old immigrants surround his temporary immigration.

Perfumes are often ghosts, emanations of lost time. Scents lie deep in neurological memory, as if we were still primitive mammals, depending on our noses to detect ripeness—or rot, for that matter. (The physicist Richard Feynman once showed, as a party trick, that the human nose is powerful still—he could detect a man’s scent almost as keenly as a bloodhound.)53 Lowell rarely mentions smell—the rich air of Castine and its skunks is unnatural in his work. He’s more often a poet of needling visual imagination.

In California, the richness ripens into absence—if Heaney were back in Ireland, he would not be smelling eucalyptus. The lingering odor of a mouthful of wine, presumably drunk alone, becomes part of this longing in the nose—the act of smelling the beloved is now remembered, smelling the trace of her perfume on the cold pillow. Those scents can drive a lover almost mad. The moment ought to be preserved, for all it says about marital intimacy—the traces we leave for our lovers, the presences those absences are.

Such desires grow stronger the longer they are endured. At this moment of intense yearning the poet, in a coup de théâtre, dispatches to the stage that most unromantic animal, the skunk. The scent of the lover draws us forward; the skunk’s stink drives us away. If there’s a tour de force there can be a tour de farce—the farce embedded here underlies Warner Brothers’ cartoon skunk, the suave and perpetually lovelorn Pepé Le Pew, his voice imitating Charles Boyer, the great screen-lover. Desire can rise up even in the face of the unromantic, but desire passed off as comedy.

And there she was, the intent and glamorous,

Ordinary, mysterious skunk,

Mythologized, demythologized,

Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.

 

It all came back to me last night, stirred

By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,

Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer

For the black plunge-line nightdress.

And there she was—the peripeteia fulfills the expectation announced in the first stanza. Here she is—not the lover but the skunk. Perhaps only on second reading is it plain how much the armature of the poem depends not on arrival but expectation. The skunk is greeted by an extraordinary gout of adjectives, six in all, in pairs of rising opposition (intent is only thinly at odds with glamorous, but mythologized a U-turn from demythologized)—the sort of attention that in a sonnet would be visited upon the lover alone. It’s as if a cask of adjectives had been broached. (Perhaps it’s merely wishful to think that Lowell’s skunk mythology is demythologized here.) The mechanism of desire should remind us of Shakespeare’s devious sonnet of backhanded compliment, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”

“The Skunk” is an homage to Mrs. Heaney’s bottom—it’s hard to deny. The intensity of desire; the irrational, whimsical projection onto the skunk; the comic perversion of being a voyeur of skunks: the already twisted elements of this love affair with Nature have been married in this final droll epiphany. The poem, the last stanza wryly reveals, has all been a flashback, those California dreams (what happens in Berkeley stays in Berkeley, apparently) forgotten after the poet returned home. Forgotten, or repressed. The tail begot a tale; but told the other way, headfirst, it would have lost half the mystery of longing—what is now climactic would have been anticlimactic. The poem knows it must hold the moment of recognition in reserve.

There she is. His wife has shed her clothes before bed; but, instead of standing naked before him, she grubs in the bureau drawer for a sexy nightdress, so she can re-robe and re-disrobe. (The moment is tender in its domestic comedy, its play of knowledge and anticipation.) No—the sexy nightdress, so both already know its effect on him. Sootfall deserves a minor disquisition in the gallery of Heaney’s coinages. Her clothes are perhaps black as soot; but soot must follow a blaze, like desire—and where there is soot, as in a chimney, another fire may come. Ass tipped in the air, nose to the ground like that California skunk, head wedged like Lowell’s skunk—bottom drawer is an accidental pun that almost tips the ending into farce. Nevertheless, you must have a strong marriage to describe your wife as a skunk.

Yet the sexiness of Mrs. Heaney’s bottom would be lost if at that moment we thought of the skunk’s anal scent-glands, or of what happens after the skunk adopts the tail-up posture. A good poem knows what to leave out, and a good poet how to distract the reader. (Similarly, if Mrs. Heaney is going to don the black nightdress, the skunk’s chasuble, the priest’s vow of chastity might have come modestly into play. There must be a quiet thrill in seducing a priest, especially a female priest.) We should not ignore that, among primates, the tipped-up bottom is an act of “presenting,” in a meaning not available in the OED (the technical term is “lordosis”). The female offers herself, ready to be mounted.

What has died? Certain longings, certain illusions. In the restoration of domestic harmony, there’s loss of the freewheeling fantasy of distance, loss of the pang of mock adultery. Seeing your wife naked once more, there must be a guilty shiver in suddenly recalling the tail-up prowl of the skunk, as one might a casual adultery conducted thousands of miles away—it’s as if, having left your mistress, you go home to find your wife dressed as your mistress. In the Freudian comedy, the displacement has been displaced.

Where the skunk received the longing due the wife, the wife has been magnificently transformed into a skunk—indeed, full of animal desire, she’s about to dress as a beast (as Queen Pasiphaë concealed herself in the wooden cow), the nightdress plunging between the breasts and perhaps as far as the belly, revealing her white skin like the skunk’s white stripe. Her lingerie has become a chasuble. It’s almost a lost scene in Shakespeare, or a lost passage from Ovid—the wife dressing as the skunk to attract her husband, who has a thing for skunks. The poem invokes ceremony without being ceremonious.

The comedy wheels in various directions—perhaps no poem more tender has ever been devoted to a wife’s bare ass. You might say that some four centuries after Titian54 and Cranach discovered women’s bottoms,55 Heaney has at last taken the rear into poetry. Marital harmony restored, the poet again in possession of the memory of loss that ought to make this homecoming the more affecting, the poem, like movies of a certain day, demurely takes its leave before the real action begins. What is more potent than a love potion—Eucalyptus #5, perhaps—that leads to a moment of comic bestiality? All along the poet has been not Circe but Puck—for Puck gave Bottom the head of an ass. If that’s a joke too far, then life has restored to the wife the spirit of an animal.

CODA

“Skunk Hour” was written during the last years of the Eisenhower administration, and something contrary to the smugness of those rootless years infuses the tone. We never escape the land of pastoral, the Lowell pastoral of collapse and moral decay, the fraught surroundings that act as a descent into hell, for the outer world is always a manifestation of spirit—it’s not for Lowell to offer comic relief or the oppositions of comedy. Aren’t such collapses also kin to those ruins the Romantics found such an apt source of contemplation, these memento mori the reminder that, however grand the palace, or abbey, or monument to victory, after some centuries it will be no more than a ruin, and a monument to ruin?

Among mammals the skunk is among the most reviled, the most associated with comic misapprehension—not for lowly mores (as a parent, the mother skunk is fiercely loyal), but for the Darwinian accident of its smell. In both “Skunk Hour” and “The Skunk,” this unhappy state suggests the disorder of the world, which the poems set to rights—sanity and marital love are the steady states toward which the unexpected symbol drives. Heaney’s skunk does not overturn Lowell’s world so much as genially rewrite it. The Main Street parade of skunks becomes the tail that parades; the night voyeur of love-cars the skunk’s nightly voyeur (both men take a slightly unnatural—and slightly pathetic—interest in skunks); the scavenging skunk with her head stuck in a sour-cream cup the wife with her head in the bureau drawer; the promise of sex in the love-cars the promise with which “The Skunk” abandons us, voyeurs ourselves. At the heart of both poems stand marriage and a wife.

Both poems are about love, but more accurately they’re about longing—love is a word Lowell mentions only in quotation. The steady sanities to which he would like to return, the disordered world that ought to be set aright, lie partly in his own unstable mind; while the desire Heaney feels for his wife cannot be registered except at distance—cunningly, he recalls the loneliness a world away when his sexy wife kneels there in the room, bottom up. Is that a deeper solitude, or a more sublime satisfaction, feeling the retrospective tinge of loneliness and the retroactive gratification of loss? Or, as Empson might have had it, both at once, loss and fulfillment, emptiness and surfeit—eating your cake then having it, too. Yet in Heaney’s poem the word love is never mentioned—it merely suffuses the air like a whiff of perfume.

If “Skunk Hour” worries its way toward the restoration of marriage, in Heaney’s the marital bonds are unified and sustained by the act of memory, by the complicated backdrops of pasts to which the present must come. “The Skunk” could not have been written entirely innocent of Lowell’s skunk; yet such knowledge is not, in a poem, necessarily guilty. One can take the hint, as the phrase goes, knowing in an instant that one’s handling, one’s regard, one’s perception will be different—the later poem becomes an intricate act of homage and forgetfulness (indeed, the homage to and forgetfulness of the wife in “The Skunk” are almost imitative acts). Heaney is indebted without remaining in debt. The night hours of the poets’ sanities, their last resolves, are different, however—one welcomes himself back to the marital bed, the other finds only a temporary stay against madness. In December 1957,56 Lowell had a complete breakdown and was hospitalized. We are reassured in the later poem to the degree we are left ill at ease in the earlier.

It would be easy to say that “The Skunk” uses the slippery, unreliable passage of time the way “Skunk Hour” exploits the collapsed unities of space. (Lowell’s poems are often drawn to spatial circumstance—he had a painter’s eye, an intimating control of foreground and background.) For the poet, figure and ground are often circumstance and philosophy, or act and meditation—meditation is the poet’s equivalent of clouds and river in the misty distance. Peculiarly among his contemporaries, Heaney is a poet always aware of the clock—he has a complicating sensitivity to verb tense, and his poems are not always told front to back. The past and present in his poems are always contending—the past is the shadow on the future, the present the projection of the past.

The indomitable life and fulfilled being that drive both poems derive from the mother skunk, the possessive instincts of maternal love fending off the capitulation to death. Lowell’s Catholicism (or, later, ex-Catholicism) seems to have responded more viscerally to the self-sacrifice of the Madonna and Magdalen than to the self-abnegation of the Christ—perhaps Lowell felt he already possessed too much grandiose sacrifice in his character, or perhaps he didn’t like to share top billing. In his mania, he often suffered delusions of grandeur. What better delusion than to adopt as your own the words of Satan, or Milton? (In one bout of madness, Lowell believed he was Milton.)57

“Skunk Hour” is about invaders, too—in the disorders to the natural order, in the visits of the millionaire (doubly disordered, rather than a reversion to order, when he goes bankrupt or vanishes), in the fairy decorator (again, doubly perverse—he’d rather marry), in Lowell’s haunting of the lover’s lane, and at last in the nocturnal march of the skunks. Heaney is the alien in California, Lowell the New Englander not quite belonging to the town—he was a fallen Brahmin, no Down Easter.

If the poems are about displacement, we should recognize that these are modern pastorals and that what has been shoved aside is not the speakers, or not the speakers alone, but the natural world. Nature has been overrun, but part of Nature—seagull, coyote, raccoon, bear, fox—thrives on the castoffs of man. These visitations by the skunk are reminders of a natural order lost. Lost, but in some way found again, as Adam and Eve lost a paradise but found a world. You might think Lowell’s was an ecological poem avant la lettre; but both poems are just as much actions of moral philosophy, trespassing into the comic wryness of Aesop’s fables. Man invades nature; but, as so often in love, the bestial invades man. How Romantic. How romantic.