Through the journey that is Robert Lowell's Life Studies, the reader has become rather properly introduced to Lowell as both a poet and a man, as these two titles are interchangeable in the realm of confessional poetry. Throughout the collection, Lowell chooses to include the most intimate of details concerning his personal life, including death, madness, and those existential questions that beg to be answered. However, the last poem of the collection is simply titled "Skunk Hour." Why is Lowell choosing to end his somber journey with the image of a skunk?
First of all, the poem does not immediately begin with the image of pungent skunk odor. Rather, like many of Lowell's previous poems, notably "Waking in Blue," Lowell begins with detached descriptions of the inhabitants of a given area. In "Waking in Blue," Lowell described characters found in the mental hospital in which he was committed for three months. The characters have passed the prime of their life and are unable to accept the futility of age and decay. Therefore, the character of Stanley "still hoard[s] the build of a boy in his twenties," and the character of Bobbie has reverted to childhood as he "swashbuckles about in his birthday suit and horses at chairs." The characters of "Skunk Hour" echo the former poem, as they experience their own sort of decay. We find:
--"Nautilus Island's hermit heiress" in her dotage. Longing to relive the decadence of her youth in the Victorian area, she continuously purchases "eyesores," only to let them fall.
--The "summer millionaire." Past his prime, his wealth is shamed at an auction.
--The "fairy decorator." A man whose work is unfulfilling and fruitless longs to marry, yet there are no prospects.
There is decay and failure in each of the characters' lives, as they cannot accept life as it progresses. They construct a world of fantasies and property values only to learn that their constructed lives have expiration dates. Similarly, Lowell himself has a moment of fantasy, as he hears "my own ill-spirit sob in each blood cell," lamenting his loneliness after hearing a love song on a car radio and observing "love-cars." The climax of the poem is the moment that Lowell realizes that "nobody's here." He is utterly alone, depraved of humanity. However, the poem only shifts into self pity momentarily, as Lowell discovers that he is indeed not alone, as skunks begin their night feeding.
These skunks have no romanticized qualities; Lowell states that the mother skunk "jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream" that she has discovered in a garbage dispenser at midnight. Survival is of the utmost importance to these creatures. They feed at midnight to elude predators, and yet they are unashamed to consume others' waste. Unlike the human characters whose material centered lives have distinct expiration dates, these skunks are not afraid to eat the curdled sour cream of life, as it is the only thing that ensures survival.
At the end of the poem, Lowell breathes the "rich air," littered with the smell of skunk. It is in this moment that the revelation of the book occurs. As we can tell from poems such as "My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow," Lowell has dealt with the events in his own life by detachment and formalization. Each event is sterilized, as he dons his "formal pearl gray shorts" for his mother's esteemed family and describes his mother's corpse "panetone in Italian tinfoil" in "Sailing Home from Rapallo." For the first time in the collection, Lowell is freely identifying with a group without force. It may seem to be ironic that he is identifying with such an abhorred animal; however, through the depictions of his previous poems, humans do not seem to fare better than his black and white comrades, as they are shallow, concerned with monetary gain and the retention of youth. In one moment, Lowell chooses to disregard all notions of false security in life, whether by riches, detachment, or sterilization and chooses to survive in the trash that is life, as the skunks have chosen to do.
