Robert Lowell's "The Skunk Hour" Term Paper

The white stripes on their backs, and the red of their moonstruck eyes, are like flags paraded in front of the "chalk-dry and spar" spire of the Trinitarian Church. Moonstruck individuals may be insane, as might those who travel the darkened ways of Main Street seeking religious guidance. The church steeple is likened to a dry old spar on a ship. The ship sails no more. The Trinitarian idea out of which three are one is not possible in a place where the reconciliation of disparate parts seems beyond hoping. The old church also speaks to the departure of old ways and traditions. The America of yesterday is gone with nothing to replace it.

So, the narrator stands alone on top of his back steps. He is like a monument in front of a neoclassic public building. But the building is turned around. Its grand entrance faces backward, or is hidden from view, like all the desperate dreams of Nautilus Island. The narrator can breathe the rich air and hope to be revived. There must be life somewhere, a breath of inspiration; a wind of hope. The mother skunk and her "column of kittens" come like new builders to add another pillar to the building's colonnade. There is still room for improvement and growth. The kittens are the hope of the future. The new column represents the possibility of a new order that grows out of the past. Tradition can still be used to create something new and monumental. Yet this tradition is empty. The column of kittens swills from a garbage pail. The foundation is rotten. The "cream" of the island is sour and it is all the food that is available to the mother skunk. A hodgepodge animal, a confusion of figures and dreams, she drops her "ostrich tail" like the heiress's friends of long ago left aside their ostrich feather fans when the old balls fell silent forever. The glory of the past is become an ornament on a smelly animal. But even the animal's natural defense "will not scare." The skunk with its primordial protections cannot, or will not defend, its tiny domain of swill and sour cream. The narrator is not a threat because he can never be... not anymore. Nautilus Island is a dead place. It has lost its bearings in the sea, and floats a drift toward eternal oblivion. The narrator, too, has nowhere to go, and so will remain on his back steps, a powerless figure, unable either to scare or inspire - a dead dream like Nautilus Island.

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