The Skunk

Poetry › Seamus Heany (1979)

“The Skunk” transforms a domestic scene into a meditation on love, memory, and imagination. Written while Heaney was separated from his wife, the poem turns a nocturnal skunk into an emblem of erotic renewal and creative vitality.

Up, black, striped and demasked like the chasuble At a funeral mass, the skunk’s tail Paraded the skunk. Night after night I expected her like a visitor.   The refrigerator whinnied into silence. 5 My desk light softened beyond the verandah. Small oranges loomed in the orange tree. I began to be tense as a voyeur.   After eleven years i was composing Love-letters again, broaching the “wife” 10 Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel Had mutated into the night earth and air   Of California. The beautiful, useless Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence. The aftermath of a mouthful of wine 15 Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.   And there she was, the intent and glamorous, Ordinary, mysterious skunk, Mythologized, demythologized, Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me. 20   It all came back to me last night, stirred By the sootfall of your things at bedtime, Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer For the black plunge-line nightdress.

Background and Context

First published in Field Work (1979), “The Skunk” was written while Heaney was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, far from his wife, Marie, and their children. The poem’s setting—warm, fragrant, nocturnal California—contrasts with the cold, domestic imagery of Ireland found in his earlier work. In that distance, Heaney rediscovers intimacy through imagination: the skunk, at once ordinary and “glamorous,” becomes a double for his absent wife and for poetry itself, which transforms the everyday into revelation.

The poem fuses the sacred and the erotic, the mundane and the mythical, echoing Yeats’ tension between flesh and spirit. Its imagery of ritual vestments, wine, and incense lends religious solemnity to marital love, while its precise sensory details—eucalyptus, oranges, the hush of the refrigerator—anchor the vision in domestic modernity. “The Skunk” ultimately celebrates the persistence of desire in long partnership and the capacity of memory to make the ordinary luminous.

Questions for Consideration

1. How does Heaney use religious imagery (“chasuble,” “Mass,” “ritual”) to elevate or transform erotic experience?
2. What is the effect of the poet’s distance from home? How does California’s landscape shape his tone of longing and rediscovery?
3. In what ways is the skunk both “ordinary” and “mysterious”? How does Heaney balance domestic realism with mythic suggestion?
4. Discuss the poem’s structure and pacing. How does Heaney’s syntax mimic the rhythm of anticipation and memory?
5. How does the poem treat marriage differently from earlier Heaney poems like “Follower” or “Digging”? What changes in tone or focus are evident?
6. What does “broaching the ‘wife’ / Like a stored cask” suggest about intimacy over time? Is it tender, ironic, reverent, or all three?
7. Compare this poem’s treatment of desire to Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse” or D. H. Lawrence’s “Piano.” How does Heaney’s realism alter the lyric tradition?
8. How do the closing stanzas link erotic imagination to creative renewal?
9. What is “mythologized, demythologized” doing here? How does it reflect Heaney’s dual vision as both lover and poet?
10. The skunk is a nocturnal scavenger—does that choice undercut or enrich the poem’s sense of beauty and grace?

Journal Prompts

1. Describe an ordinary object or animal that has taken on personal significance for you. How might it, like Heaney’s skunk, evoke intimacy or memory?
2. Heaney transforms separation into creativity. Write about a time when distance (geographical or emotional) deepened your understanding of connection.
3. Explore how ritual—religious or domestic—appears in the poem. Do you have daily rituals that carry symbolic or emotional power?
4. The poem’s tone mixes reverence and humor. How does Heaney sustain both? Write about a moment in which the ordinary became suddenly sacred.
5. Compare “The Skunk” with another poem about marital love—perhaps Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 43” or Sharon Olds’ “I Go Back to May 1937.” What distinguishes Heaney’s approach?
6. The poem’s title evokes both sensuality and the comic. How does Heaney’s animal imagery challenge conventional depictions of beauty?
7. Write a short creative imitation in which a small domestic detail (a scent, a sound, a gesture) becomes the focus of memory and desire.