'Skunk Hour\r'

'Elizabeth Bishop’s â€Å"The Armadillo” and Robert Lowell’s â€Å" bum instant” be dedicated to one some former(a) non simply out of friendship, only if because to each one poet imitates each other’s style and alludes to the other’s key personal traits. While Bishop comments on her friend Lowell’s rage against humanity’s cruelty, Lowell writes of Bishop’s isolation and inner darkness, yet withal a resilience to persevere. Written first, â€Å"The Armadillo” describes a solemnisation in which ack-ack balloons are illegally eagerness aloft, only to fall and burn animals’ homes.The meter moves from describing something simply delightful, as the balloons â€Å"flush and fill with light / that comes and goes, same hearts” to a suddenly violent characterization of the burst balloon burning an owls’ nest, frightening the birds from their home. As it burns, an armadillo and baby rabbit flee the scene. Scholar genus Penelope Laurens writes: â€Å"Bishop dedicated this poem to Robert Lowell, who became a conscientious dissenter when the Allied command began fire-bombing German cities.Bishop’s poem points directly to these fire bombings, which wreaked the same kind of scare destruction on a part of our man that the fire balloons wreak on the animals” (â€Å"On ‘The Armadillo’”). The seemingly beautiful balloons become something ugly †â€Å"falling fire and piercing cry” †and the armadillo seems to symbolize Lowell, the â€Å"weak send fist” seize against the war’s cruelty. However, it is slight about his anti-war stance than about Bishop’s hold for Lowell’s ability to write beautifully nevertheless about ugly, harsh subjects.According to scholar Bonnie Costello, â€Å"The Armadillo” â€Å"has been skim as a critique of his way of make art out of suffering . . . [ precise ly here] she dramatizes this aesthetic place and the inevitable return to the rage of the suffering proboscis” (â€Å"On ‘The Armadillo’”). Indeed, Bishop moves from a detached description of the balloons on strictly aesthetic terms and makes their effects spectacular and personal, with a sort of quiet anger at the cruelty of their effects.In response, Lowell playfully alludes to her as the â€Å"hermit inheritress” with a bishop for a son (indeed, Bishop was childless and reclusive), and the â€Å" pansy decorator” seems a nod to Bishop’s homosexuality, but these figures matter far less than the skunk at the end. As Bishop acknowledged Lowell’s gesture against warfare, Lowell pays aegis to Bishop’s view of the world just about her †non as quaint and antiquated, as the first stanzas suggest, but as well as a decaying place, but similarly one where life continues nonetheless.Lowell himself claimed, â€Å"The f irst four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or less amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town . . . [but then] all comes alive in stanzas V and VI. This is the dark night . . . not gracious, but secular, puritan, and agnostical” (â€Å"On ‘Skunk Hour’”). The skunks seem a symbol of humanity, carrying on despite the unnamed malaise, more than like the armadillo symbolizes Lowell’s gesture against cruelty.Here, Lowell identifies with Bishop; Steven Gould Axelrod writes that Lowell â€Å"personifies that disease . . . [and] is as isolated and demented as the heiress, as move as the ruined millionaire, and as loveless and artistically failed as the decorator” (â€Å"On ‘Skunk Hour’”). A sense of self-loathing and inner darkness permeates the poem, implying that Lowell sees these in Bishop. However, the skunk at the end â€Å"will not scare,” making its way despite the world around it.These two poems commen t on their subjects’ personal traits and outlooks, using symbols to describe each other. Bishop’s armadillo, a small, clenched being in the midst of chaos, pays tribute to Lowell’s antiwar stance, while the Lowell’s skunk, which moves furtively in its decaying hot England setting, acknowledges Bishop’s sense of despair but also her tenacity and willingness to persevere as both person and artist. REFERENCES Anonymous. â€Å"On ‘The Armadillo. ’” 2000. Modern American Poetry.18 frame 2006. <http://www. english. uiuc. edu/maps/poets/a_f/bishop/armadillo. htm>. ________. â€Å"On ‘Skunk Hour’. ” 2000. Modern American Poetry. 18 bunt 2006. <http://www. english. uiuc. edu/maps/poets/g_l/lowell/skunk. htm>. ________. â€Å"The Armadillo. ” 1997. The Academy of American Poets. 18 March 2006. <http://www. poets. org/viewmedia. php/prmMID/15214>. ________. â€Å"Skunk Hour. ” 1997. T he Academy of American Poets. 18 March 2006. <http://www. poets. org/viewmedia. php/prmMID/15279>.\r\n'