Robert Lowell Skunk Hour Essay
Robert Lowell’s Skunk Hour
We all love a good scare once and a while, that is why we invite the nightmares and spooks ( especially around Halloween. ) what is unique, and,
“ultimately disturbing” (Shmoop Editorial team) about this poem is that
Robert Lowell didn’t have to write about scary stories to create that
“spooky effect ” (Shmoop Editorial Team) the speaker of the poem admits to being mentally ill, has chronic depression and that is nightmarish enough.
Nothing scary happens in the poem. Lowell just roams the seaside aimlessly through the day and night. But what we readers discover is that the speaker is “caught in the haunted house of his mind and all the doors are locked”
(Shmoop Editorial Team)
It was …show more content…
Lowell for some reason now wanders into a graveyard. He confronts death on “Hill’s skull.”(Lowell) Not there to see anyone, but to more so mourn the death of himself. Where there was once life inside of him, now lays dead.
Axelrod says that here, Lowell is going through “psychological separateness” He not only feels separated from himself but separated from
God. He feels like he has been cast away from society and God. So he punishes and judges himself. He becomes his own worst critic and once again, his own personal hell. “The poem most directly faces the horror of the void created by the absences of values” (Altieri) Lowell seems quite disgusted with the
“absences of sources of meaning” (Altieri) Altieri says that the landscape is represented by the “privet realm where one defines his personal identity” why would Lowell go into the graveyard to find himself? Perhaps he just wandered in; perhaps by surrounding himself with those that were truly dead would make him feel more alive. Through out the poem, Lowell struggles
We all love a good scare once and a while, that is why we invite the nightmares and spooks ( especially around Halloween. ) what is unique, and,
“ultimately disturbing” (Shmoop Editorial team) about this poem is that
Robert Lowell didn’t have to write about scary stories to create that
“spooky effect ” (Shmoop Editorial Team) the speaker of the poem admits to being mentally ill, has chronic depression and that is nightmarish enough.
Nothing scary happens in the poem. Lowell just roams the seaside aimlessly through the day and night. But what we readers discover is that the speaker is “caught in the haunted house of his mind and all the doors are locked”
(Shmoop Editorial Team)
It was …show more content…
Lowell for some reason now wanders into a graveyard. He confronts death on “Hill’s skull.”(Lowell) Not there to see anyone, but to more so mourn the death of himself. Where there was once life inside of him, now lays dead.
Axelrod says that here, Lowell is going through “psychological separateness” He not only feels separated from himself but separated from
God. He feels like he has been cast away from society and God. So he punishes and judges himself. He becomes his own worst critic and once again, his own personal hell. “The poem most directly faces the horror of the void created by the absences of values” (Altieri) Lowell seems quite disgusted with the
“absences of sources of meaning” (Altieri) Altieri says that the landscape is represented by the “privet realm where one defines his personal identity” why would Lowell go into the graveyard to find himself? Perhaps he just wandered in; perhaps by surrounding himself with those that were truly dead would make him feel more alive. Through out the poem, Lowell struggles