It’s hard not to feel that things are worse now than they’ve ever been. But looking back at the fifties, I remember feeling they were pretty terrible then. This poem, from that period by Robert Lowell, gives a good description of that feeling:
Skunk Hour
(for Elizabeth Bishop)
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 selectman 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 lets them fall.
The season’s ill–
we’ve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill. Continue reading “A little perspective”