Mushroom Poems

Table of Contents

1. The Mushroom

   by Emily Dickinson

   
   

   ►

   ▼

    Full Text

   The mushroom is the elf of plants,
   At evening it is not;
   At morning in a truffled hut
   It stops upon a spot
   

   As if it tarried always;
   And yet its whole career
   Is shorter than a snake's delay,
   And fleeter than a tare.
   

   'T is vegetation's juggler,
   The germ of alibi;
   Doth like a bubble antedate,
   And like a bubble hie.
   

   I feel as if the grass were pleased
   To have it intermit;
   The surreptitious scion
   Of summer's circumspect.
   

   Had nature any outcast face,
   Could she a son contemn,
   Had nature an Iscariot,
   That mushroom, — it is him.
   

2. Mushroom Song

   by Hilda Conkling

   Oh little mushrooms with brown faces underneath
   And bare white heads,
   You think of summer and you think of song . . .
   Why don't you think of me
   In my little white bed
   In the night?
   You think only of your singsong and your dances,
   Following your leader round and round,
   You think only of the grass
   And the green apples and leaves
   Dropping out of the blue . . .
   Why don't you think of me asleep
   In my little white bed?
   The wind thinks of me,
   Brown-white dancers!
   You forget,
   But the wind remembers.
   

3. The Mushroom Gatherers

   by Rachel Field

   
   

   ►

   ▼

    Full Text

   Into the woods behind the farm
   Where the yellow mushrooms grow,
   Each with a basket on an arm,
   Into the woods we'll go.
   

   Lightly our feet will carry us there
   Past thicket and fallen tree,
   Till we come to the sun-patched clearing where
   Grows that golden company.
   

   We shall find them wherever our eyes may look—
   Scattered or in a ring;
   In mossy hollow; in rooty nook
   And the fir boughs’ sheltering.
   

   Spicy and plump and strangely cold,
   We'll gather them where they grow,
   And when each basket brims with gold,
   Home through the woods we'll go.
   

Related Poems