Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell was an American poet born in 1917 and died in 1977. During his lifetime, he was a celebrated poet. His poems were mainly about his family, past, and present. He wrote autobiographical poems that emphasized his personal, family, and psychological struggles. In one of his autobiographical poems, he recollects his memories as a child and combines them with those of his adulthood to demonstrate the traumatic experience he went through.

Lowell writes in his poem ‘skunk hour’ of how he had lost purpose, courage, and desire in life. The reason being the frustrations, failure, and doubts he had about himself. He presents himself in three forms, the first being a woman in an island buying cultural antiques but fails.

“Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.” (Lowell, lines 7-12)

The next starts with “the season is ill” (13), showing frustration, of a rich man ” summer millionaire” (14)  who goes bankrupt and opts to auction his yacht. The last scene demonstrates a person who wanders in deep agony and a spiritual crisis. On climbing a hill, he finds the degraded modern condition, and his spirit cries.

“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” ( 25-36)

All the scenes show the frustration, failure, and doubt that the author was going through. In the end, he finds a breakthrough from his agonies as stated in the poem

” I stand on topof 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.” ( 43-48)

When he observes the skunk with the kittens toiling in the garbage without fear so that they eat, he is encouraged by the skunks’ desire, passion, and their fertility. The skunks make the author learn that to overcome the frustrations and traumatic experiences he had to start a new life with desire and passion for succeeding

Robert Lowell positively used his experiences to improve himself. The disappointments, failures, and doubts he had become a lesson after watching a skunk with no powers like him struggling in the city fearlessly.

Work Cited

Lowell, Robert. “On ‘Skunk Hour.'” Collected Prose. New York: FS&G, 1987. 227.