Skunk Hour Analysis

This poem seems to be formally organized, but it's really all over the place. At first read, you see that the stanzas are all the same length (six lines apiece) and that there's definitely some rhy...

The speaker is someone who is mentally ill. He seems sad and lonely, as well as bitter (note the tone he uses when describing the townspeople) and restless (driving around all night, standing on hi...

"Skunk Hour" is set on an island off the coast of Maine. In the first part of the poem, the speaker shows us the major players of the community, and it seems to take place during the daytime hours....

This poem is a mouthful! The first two lines are hard to say without sounding like you have a mouth packed with marbles. There's a lot going on in many of these lines – some are super long an...

Robert Lowell has plenty of fun throughout this poem toying around with double meanings and puns. When he writes one thing, be ready for the wink wink, nudge nudge that leads you to the tongue-in-c...

Lowell is known for including tons of stuff in his poems. They often seem to start out with a narrative style (telling a story), then a wrench gets thrown into the system – he starts off on s...

At first read "Skunk Hour" can be a little bit of a head scratcher. Understanding what the skunks have to do with anything can be super frustrating. But once you start to break it down and become m...

There's a tongue-in-cheek mention of homosexuality near the beginning of the poem, and then we get the "love cars" in the next stanza. Nothing actually happens, but there are moments of potential s...

Queen Victoria (line 9)L.L. Bean (line 15)Tudor Ford (line 26)"Careless Love," a traditional song (line 32)