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Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems

Part Three: Nature 25. The mushroom is the elf of plants

THE MUSHROOM.


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.