Nice to read all the comments on Lowell's "Skunk Hour", especially Kasey's extended.

I would just interpose that the line "I hear / my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell" don't seem so awful to me. I think it has to be read in context. The whole poem, from the opening-line "Nautilus Island", is wrapped around "ill" and "ell" sounds. This is a situation in which the larger structural context moderates the surface exaggeration of the line. It occurs in the poem's pivotal, "crisis" stanza, followed shortly by "I myself am hell". After which, the lines that follow about the skunks (with their "swills", "pail" & "tail") come as a kind of bleak-comic relief, the return of nature after the melodramatic ill-nature of the speaker's despair.