The Mushroom Is the Elf of Plants
The Mushroom Is the Elf of Plants - meaning Summary
Ephemeral Trickster of Nature
Dickinson treats the mushroom as a small, mysterious being: an elflike, secretive presence that appears at evening and vanishes by morning. The poem emphasizes its brief, capricious life—faster than a plant, shorter than a snake’s pause—likening it to bubbles and a juggler of vegetation. The speaker senses the grass tolerates this covert offshoot of summer, and closes by imagining the mushroom as nature’s apostate or renegade. Overall the poem playfully personifies a common fungus to explore transience, elusiveness, and a mildly subversive element within the natural world.
Read Complete AnalysesThe Mushroom is the Elf of Plants – At Evening, it is not At Morning, in a Truffled Hut It stop opon a Spot As if it tarried always And yet it’s whole Career Is shorter than a Snake’s Delay – And fleeter than a Tare – ‘Tis Vegetation’s Juggler – The Germ of Alibi – Doth like a Bubble antedate And like a Bubble, hie – I feel as if the Grass was pleased To have it intermit – This surreptitious Scion Of Summer’s circumspect. Had Nature any supple Face Or could she one contemn – Had Nature an Apostate – That Mushroom – it is Him!
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