On the Poetry and Politics of the Mushroom

Mushrooms - Sylvia Plath, by petropicto on deviantart.com

http://petropicto.deviantart.com/art/Mushrooms-Sylvia-Plath-417454440  

Whether D. H. Lawrence might fairly be described as a mycophobe is debatable, but it's certainly the case that all things fungal - including the beastly bourgeois parasitically flourishing amid decay - cause a violently hostile reaction, as we see, for example, in the following lines of verse:

How beastly the bourgeois is

especially the male of the species -

Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable -

and like a fungus, living on the remains of bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own.

And even so, he's stale, he's been there too long.
Touch him, and you'll find he's all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.

...

Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp England
what a pity they can't all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.

Contrast these lines in which Lawrence identifies male members of the English middle-class as members of the fungus family (a large group of eukaryotic organisms that include yeasts, moulds, and mushrooms and which are distinct from plants and animals, even though they often have a symbiotic relationship with these other life forms), with what Sylvia Plath writes in her very beautiful if slightly menacing poem '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.


What's immediately striking is how Plath has a much more positive view of fungus; she sees in it the revolutionary hope of the future and relates it not to a decadent ruling class, but, on the contrary, to a subversive underclass who will one day come to fruition and bear spores.

This image of a soft-body of people rising up, is said by feminist critics to refer to the emancipation and empowerment of women and I like this interpretation as it's one that offers great promise and is not merely threatening. There's also none of the hysteria that one finds in Lawrence's verse.  
        

References: 

D. H. Lawrence, 'How beastly the bourgeois is -', The Poems (Vol. I), ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (CUP, 2013). 
Sylvia Plath, 'Mushrooms', The Colossus and Other Poems, (William Heinemann, 1960).