Written by Jonah Miller (lone pine poetry)

I know the standard reading of the skunks is all about life moving on, but to me, the ending isn't about continuity. It’s about faking continuity.

It’s telling that the skunks only appear after the speaker calls himself hell: “I myself am hell; / nobody’s here— / only skunks…” Right before that, Lowell gives us the senile heiress, the “summer millionaire” whose yawl is auctioned off, and “our fairy / decorator” who “brightens his shop for fall” with orange corks and awls but “there is no money in his work, / he’d rather marry.”

To me, these are all examples of people just trying to survive the hand they were dealt. A woman buying up property to keep her world quiet. A man decorating around decay because if life is rotting around you, you might as well make it look nice. What makes this even sharper is the contrast with the heiress’s son (a bishop) and her farmer (first selectman). They have gone out into the world and made something of their lives, not only for personal benefit, but for the community around them. This backs up the point: what are the central figures (the woman, the decorator, the speaker) doing with their lives besides avoidance? They opt for containment and retreat rather than engagement or contribution.

The car scene is really where it all comes together. “I watched for love-cars…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…” He’s sitting there struggling with his own loneliness, listening to a radio song that talks about love as careless.

What's great about that radio song is that it isn’t a sweet love story; it's about a love that destroys you. Whether you look at Hugh Laurie's version ('I’ll be damned if I let you rob me out of my soul') or Billie Holiday's variation on W.C. Handy ('we are growing used to soul-less souls'), the theme is the same: opening yourself up to someone ruins you. That shifts how I read the whole stanza. He’s not watching those couples with envy; he's looking at love as a genuine threat to his safety.

It gets even more interesting when you know the backstory. That whole line, “I watched for love-cars,” comes from an anecdote about Walt Whitman doing the exact same thing, except Whitman walked away happy for those couples. For Whitman, love was beautiful; for Lowell, it’s a dark, alienating mess. (Robert Lowell: Selected Poems; Unforgotten Years by Logan Pearsall Smith).

The choice of skunks is so specific. He could’ve picked any creature to represent staying alive, but skunks are defined by their defense mechanism. When threatened, they spray to cause temporary blindness and severe pain. That feels like his exact forecast for love: a violent reaction that blinds you and leaves you hurting.

Once you see the skunks as his reflection, the ending completely changes. It’s not about finding a way to survive. It’s about retreat. In the end, he’s no better than the woman buying up isolation, or the decorator staying stuck in a job that gives him nothing back. He isn't surrendering to the natural flow of life; he’s actively choosing to stay stuck.

The mother skunk with her column of kittens is particularly interesting. Traditional readings might see it as resilient family life persisting amid decay and evidence of continuity. But to me, it implies an animal family unburdened by the costs of human emotions and the way humans experience intimacy. The skunks forage in garbage, spray when threatened, and “will not scare,” embodying defensive survival. If the speaker doesn’t risk human connection with its potential for heartbreak, soul-destroying carelessness, and exposure, he stays safer. It feels as if he's trying to convince us (and himself) that he’s content. He gets clean air, the skunks live like nothing matters save for instinct, and he doesn't have to be afraid.

It is interesting that every image involving skunks in the poem consists of a group of them surviving together. He could have chosen to speak of a solitary skunk, just like the hermit and decorator, but he grants them connection he denies himself. The idea that the skunks have a family points to an innate life we all have. We technically always do have connection through family, yet the car scene is so pivotal in its entirety that maybe familial love is not enough when you see evidence of more before you.

Is it also possible that he views himself as the skunk, managing to survive by the instinctual qualities he possesses as we all do with the limited source of love through family, while also comparing himself to a threat? Does he believe if someone gets too close, it is he who will hurt them out of pure self-defense against potential harm? Is that why the song about careless love in the earlier stanza causes him to feel like every blood cell in his body is sobbing? Doesn’t he tell us this when he says “I myself am hell” rather than saying, “I myself am in hell?” Lowell’s history with manic depression and volatile relationships heavily informs this.

At the end of the day, isn’t he just opting out of a particular human, vulnerable, “love-car” kind of love entirely? The hermit has her son, her farmer, and her cottage. The decorator has his shop. The millionaire has his money. The speaker even implies his own possible family in the last stanza: “I stand on top of our back steps.” There is connection possible for even the loneliest of people, but that does not always equal true contentment when avoidance of openness is threaded so cleanly through it.

Robert Lowell, March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977.