For Valentine's Day, poetry

Not so long ago, I mentioned my blog to a friend who is in the humanities.  She noted that Sylvia Plath wrote a poem called "Mushrooms" (1959), which I would share here, but it is easy enough for you to click the link and read it for yourself without me risking copyright violation.  I have seen where some have interpreted this poem as a metaphor for feminism, and I can see that being an underlying theme.  I, being admittedly male, don't believe I can speak to this interpretation of the poem.  As a mycologist, however, I appreciate the tone of the poem, especially when juxtaposed with another mushroom-themed poem

Let us consider the work of another great American poet, Emily Dickinson. She too penned a poem about basidiocarps, posthumously titled "The Mushroom is the elf of plants" (published in 1924 many years after her death in 1886).  You'll not be surprised to hear that I do not like this poem so well.  Though Ms. Dickinson was a student of botany, she much maligns the fungi. I am stung by the final lines "Had nature any outcast face, Could she a son contemn, Had nature an Iscariot, That mushroom, -it is him".  To be fair, this was the prevailing attitude of the 19th century.  For one, mushrooms and other fungi were considered to be plants, and it was also thought that their only role in nature was as agents of disease and decay.  What a difference the better part of a century makes!


I feel as though Plath must have been intending to author a revised view of Dickinson.  Both poems are relatively short works; five stanzas of four lines for Dickinson, eleven stanzas of three lines for Plath. In Dickinson's poem, the protagonist is addressed it the third person.  Dickinson refers to a single male mushroom.  "That mushroom, it is him".  As if referring to the mushroom as nature's Iscariot wasn't enough of a display of enmity, this poetic relationship only reinforces her disdain.  Plath, by contrast, refers to mushrooms in the first person plural ("We shall by morning/Inherit the earth/Our foot's in the door").  I especially admire the phrase 'our foot', suggesting many individuals sharing a single member.  To me, it symbolizes simultaneous unity and multitude, another fungal oddity. 

I apologize to any devotees of the humanities who may feel that I am blindly making a foray into comparative literature and sounding like a novice at best.  I am the first to admit that I am not a poet nor an experienced literary critic.   As a mycologist, though, I definitely prefer Plath's sympathetic treatment of fungi to Dickinson's unsympathetic treatment.

Ironically, on the cover of this book of Dickinson's poems is a flower that appears to me to be Indian pipe (Monotropa uniflora), which is an achlorophyllous plant that is absolutely dependent upon fungi for its nutrition.  Monotropoid plants take mycorrhizas to the next level, in that they don't provide the fungus with, well, as far as we currently know, anything.  They somehow "convince" the fungi to provision them with photosynthate (sugar) from other plants, as well as other nutrients.

 Follow up: 2/15/11.  I just found this anthology of mushroom-inspired poems entitled "Decomposition".  Clever title, that.  I just hope it's better than this album of mushroom-inspired songs.  I haven't actually listened to the whole album, to be fair, but the style is not my cup of tea.  Perhaps, as Mark Twain said about Wagner's music, it's better than it sounds.