Class and Rodents, Rodents and Class

The two poems that stood out to me the most were “The Armadillo” by Elizabeth Bishop and “Skunk Hour” by Robert Lowell. I found these poems interesting because Bishop and Lowell wrote these poems for each other. Both poems have rodent animals in the title, and are somewhat obscure. I am not sure the context of either poem, or the context of Bishop and Lowell’s relationship, but there must have been some background to these poems for them to correspond with one another. I know that Lowell wrote with a great deal of history in mind, and in his poetry he focused on war and other political matters. Bishop, as Cary Nelson put it, wrote with “unsentimental introspection,” which is evident in most of her poems. Even after reading “The Armadillo” a couple of times, I am not quite sure how the armadillo fits into the poem, or why she wrote this for Lowell, but let’s explore a little bit. Bishop begins her poem:

This is the time of year

when almost every night

the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.

Climbing the mountain height,

rising toward a saint

still honored in these parts,

the paper chambers flush and fill with light

that comes and goes, like hearts.

Once up against the sky it’s hard

to tell them from the stars—

planets, that is—the tinted ones:

Venus going down or Mars,

Or the pale green one. With a wind,

they flare and falter, wobble and toss;

but if it’s still they steer between

the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,

receding, dwindling, solemnly

and steadily forsaking us,

or, in the downdraft from a peak,

suddenly turning dangerous.

The nature of this section of her poem makes me think of fireworks flying in the air. Bishop describes them as “frail, illegal fire balloons,” and compares them to planets that “recede and dwindle solemnly.” Bishop’s description makes me think what she is describing is fireworks, but then she writes:

Last nigh another big one fell.

It splattered like an egg of fire

against the cliff behind the house.

The flame ran down. We saw the pair

of owls who nest there flying up

and up, their whirling black-and-white

stained bright pink underneath, until

they shrieked out of sight.

The ancient owl’s nest must have burned.

Hastily, all alone,

a glistening armadillo left the scene,

rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,

short-eared, to our surprise.

So soft!—a handful of intangible ash

with fixed, ignited eyes.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!

O falling fire and piercing cry

and panic, and a weak mailed fist

clenched ignorant against the sky!

The speaker continues to describe these falling “fire balloons” that fall from the sky and “splatter like an egg of fire.” The speaker also describes how two owls were run out of their nest due to these “fire balloons.” Then a rabbit comes on the scene and the fact that the rabbit is “short-eared” seems to carry significance. The rabbit’s fur is described as ash, and the rabbit has ignited eyes. The last stanza of the poem is in all italics, almost like another speaker comes in, or maybe a brief “aside” or an outside perspective of what is happening on this scene. I am not quite sure what to make of “The Armadillo,” or how to piece together the “fire balloons,” the planets, and the chaos of the animals scurrying in panic. The poem seems frantic to me, and maybe the armadillo and the other animals represent fear or anxiety. I do not want to read too much into Bishop’s poem, but the emotion of her poem seems frantic, and her descriptions feel chaotic. 

Nelson comments that Lowell’s poem, “Skunk Hour,” is written in response to Bishop’s “The Armadillo.” Lowell’s poem is set on Nautilus Island in Maine. In my opinion, Lowell’s poem seems to be talking about a class issue between rich and poor. At the beginning of his poem, he reveals a rich heiress who owns a village and has people of the town work for her. Lowell writes:

Nautilus Island’s hermit

heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;

her sheep still graze above the sea.

Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer

is first selectmen in our village;

she’s in her dotage.

Thirsting for

the hierarchic privacy

of Queen Victoria’s century,

she buys up all

the eyesores facing her shore,

and let’s them fall.

The season’s ill –

We’ve lost our summer millionaire,

who seemed to have leaped from an L.L. Bean

catalogue. His nine-knot yawl

was auctioned off to lobstermen.

A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy

decorator brightens his shop for fall;

his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,

orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;

there is no money in his work,

he’d rather marry.

So this heiress is wealthy, but is growing old in age. Somehow the town has lost their “summer millionaire,” maybe another wealthy townsmen. But the fairy decorator “brightens his shop for fall,” but does not like his work because he makes no money. The second section of the poem switches to first person, and the tone of the poem grows heavy and darker:

One dark night,

my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;

I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,

they lay together, hull to hull,

where the graveyard shelves on the town…

My mind’s not right.

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…

I myself am hell;

nobody’s here—

only skunks, that search

in the moonlight for a bite to eat.

They march on their soles up Main Street:

white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire

under the chalk-dry and spar spire

of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top

Of our back steps and breathe the rich air—

Of our back steps and breath the rich air—

a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage

pail.

she jabs her wedge-head in a cup

of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,

And will not scare.

There is an element of loneliness to the end of the poem. The speaker is riding up this hill looking for “love-cars,” but when he spots a car with the radio on, he sobs and calls himself “hell.” He is alone and only the skunks remain, but the skunks are searching through the garbage for food. The speaker says, “I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air.” While I could be reading too much into the poem, it seems as if there is a contrast between rich and poor here in his poem.  Lowell ends the poem with the speaker watching the skunks dig for food in the dumpster. The poem ends emptily and hollow. I am still not sure what to make of Lowell’s poem, but I felt more confident reading his poem than Bishop’s. Both Bishop and Lowell’s poem, have rodent animals in the titles of their poems, but the animals do not take center stage of the poem. I also noticed that Bishop and Lowell mention these animals in the conclusion of their poems. I do not know if that carries any significance, but it is just a simple observation. I enjoyed Bishop and Lowell’s poems, and I found it interesting that they used rodent animals as their titles. I wonder what they were trying to communicate to each other...

            Adam Kirsch writes a poem titled, “Professional Middle Class Couple, 1922.” This poem reminded me slightly of Lowell’s poem “Skunk Hour,” but Kirsch’s poem is more extreme than Lowell’s. Lowell writes:

What justifies the inequality

That issues her a tastefully square-cut

Ruby for her finger, him a suit

Whose rumpled, unemphatic dignity

Declares a life of working sitting down,

While someone in a sweatshop has to squint

And palsy sewing, and a continent

Sheds blood to pry the gemstone from the ground,

Could not be justice. Nothing but the use

To which they put prosperity can speak

In their defense: the faces money makes,

They demonstrate, don’t have to be obtuse,

Entitled, vapid, arrogantly strong;

Only among the burghers do you find

A glance so frank, engaging, and refined,

So tentative, so conscious of  its wrong.

The couple who works “sitting down” reminded me of the heiress in Lowell’s poem, and the workers in the sweatshop reminded me of the farm workers, and shop owner in Lowell’s work. Of course Kirsch’s poem is a cry for justice and has a harsher tone than Lowell’s, but the issue of class is seen in both poems. This theme of class was the primary reason I chose Kirsch’s poem to relate to Lowell’s. I feel that Kirsch’s work more than likely has some political undertones to it, although that may be a wrong assumption, but the tone of his poem seems to be a cry for justice for the lower class. He talks about how the workers in the sweatshop work so the lady can wear a precious stone on her hand. Kirsch shows that to the middle class people of the poem, prosperity is more important than the people who are working. Kirsch’s poem reminded me of “Yachts” by William Carlos Williams. “Professional Middle-class Couple, 1922,” had nothing unique about it, but despite the common-ness of it, the voice of his poem sung loudly throughout each line.

 Poetry has a way of communicating that other forms of literature do not. I enjoyed reading these poems this week!