Sylvia Plath & Mushrooms

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.

The poem was written in 1959 and published in 1960 in her first collection, The Colossus and Other Poems. It’s a poem about endurance, resilience and perseverance. It explores the idea that the oppressed will eventually rise up and find their place.

It is narrated as if by the mushrooms themselves, finding their way up through the earth to the surface, taking what they need from the water and the air. They make a silent invasion into the world. They are meek and bland-mannered, appearing passive, and yet they exert a quiet and relentless agency, insisting on finding their place. For many readers, the mushrooms represent women, as Sylvia Plath loved in her writings to explore the patriarchy and female constraints (the very short stanzas add to the sense of compression). She was writing the poem at the time of the Cold War, and the language of silent infiltration and subversion was appropriate to that era. It’s a metaphorical poem, using the mushroom as a symbol for the oppressed.

In 1959, she and her husband, Ted Hughes, were at Yaddo, the artists’ colony at Saratoga Springs, New York. She was pregnant, but was struggling to find publishers for her work. She was depressed and finding it terribly hard to write, in spite of having a room of her own (Ted stayed in his own room in another part of the colony). To relieve the frustration of not being able to put words down on the page, she went for long walks in the Yaddo woods, which were full of mushrooms (they were often served at meals there). The walks revived her, she suddenly heard from a publisher accepting one of her stories, and she began to feel more optimistic. Life, she felt, like the fungi, could not be kept down forever. She wrote an essay on mushrooms, which Ted praised, and that poem became this poem which pays homage to the indomitable nature of the creative spirit. Today, mushrooms are used in the treatment of depression, although Plath never lived to know that.

You can listen to the poem read by Sylvia Plath herself:

The poem has been set to music at various times and remains one of Plath’s most popular poems.