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Famous Fungus Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Fungus poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous fungus poems. These examples illustrate what a famous fungus poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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by Williams, William Carlos (WCW)
...fall over your eyes and over your mouth, 
brushing your lips wistfully that you may dream, 
sleep and dream— 

A black fungus springs out about the lonely church doors— 
sleep, sleep. The Night, coming down upon 
the wet boulevard, would start you awake with his 
message, to have in at your window. Pay no 
heed to him. He storms at your sill with 
cooings, with gesticulations, curses! 
You will not let him in. He would keep you from sleeping. 
He would ha...Read more of this...



by Nash, Ogden
...m come.
The sickening draft that taints the shaft
Blows through the devil's door!"
And he squashed the latch like a fungus patch,
And revealed the thirteenth floor.

It was cheap cigars like lurid scars
That glowed in the rancid gloom,
The murk was a-boil with fusel oil
And the reek of stale perfume.
And round and round there dragged and wound
A loathsome conga chain,
The square and the hep in slow lock step,
The slayer and the slain.
(For the souls of the vic...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...from Peshawur to Ceylon
 Was his own.
Thus the midday halt of Charnock -- more's the pity!
 Grew a City.
As the fungus sprouts chaotic from its bed,
 So it spread --
Chance-directed, chance-erected, laid and built
 On the silt --
Palace, byre, hovel -- poverty and pride --
 Side by side;
And, above the packed and pestilential town,
 Death looked down.
But the Rulers in that City by the Sea
 Turned to flee --
Fled, with each returning spring-tide from its ills
 To ...Read more of this...

by Heaney, Seamus
...Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not....Read more of this...

by Masters, Edgar Lee
...at my elm!
Sprung from as good a seed as his,
Sown at the same time,
It is dying at the top:
Not from lack of life, nor fungus,
Nor destroying insect, as the sexton thinks.
Look, Samuel, where the roots have struck rock,
And can no further spread.
And all the while the top of the tree
Is tiring itself out, and dying,
Trying to grow....Read more of this...



by Gregory, Rg
...of people nightwards
a white woman
striding like a cliff
dirt - goats in the gutter
crunched beggars
a small to breed a fungus
cafes with open mouths
men like broken teeth
or way back in the dark
like tonsils

an air of shapeless threat
fluffs in our pulse
a boundary crossed
the rules are not the same
brushed by eyes
the touch is silent
silence breeds
we feel the breath of fury
(soon to roar)
retreat within our skins
return to broader streets

bazaars glower
almost at candlel...Read more of this...

by Webb, Charles
...40-acre growth found in Michigan.
— The Los Angeles Times


The sky is full of ruddy ducks
and widgeon's, mockingbirds,
bees, bats, swallowtails,
dragonflies, and great horned owls.

The land below teems with elands
and kit foxes, badgers, aardvarks,
juniper, banana slugs, larch,
cactus, heather, humankind.

Under them, a dome of dirt.
Unde...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...om whose branches trailed the mosses, 
And whose trunk was coated over 
With the Dead-man's Moccasin-leather, 
With the fungus white and yellow.
Suddenly from the boughs above him 
Sang the Mama, the woodpecker: 
"Aim your arrows, Hiawatha, 
At the head of Megissogwon, 
Strike the tuft of hair upon it, 
At their roots the long black tresses; 
There alone can he be wounded!"
Winged with feathers, tipped with jasper, 
Swift flew Hiawatha's arrow, 
Just as Megissogwon, stoop...Read more of this...

by Lawrence, D. H.
...y 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 a 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.

Full of seething, wormy, h...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...tal phial that has colours like the moon, 
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon, 
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey 
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day, 
And death is in the phial and the end of noble work, 
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk. 
Don John's hunting, and his hounds have bayed-- 
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid. 
Gun upon gun, ha! ha! 
Gun upon gun, hurrah! 
Don J...Read more of this...

by Edson, Russell
...not, or does that make sense.
 You are not pretty, that is how you can be alone. And 
then you are pretty like fungus and alga, you are no one 
without some one, in theory alone. 

 Be good enough to go to bed so you can not think too 
much longer....Read more of this...

by Nemerov, Howard
...ocked down its throat and aerial ripped off,
Side stitched with like bullets where the stripping's gone
And rust like a fungus spreading on the fenders,

Well, what I mean, that fucking car still runs,
Even the moths in the upholstery are old
But it gets around, you see one on the street
Beat-up and proud, well, Jeezus what a country,
Where even the monuments keep on the move."...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...for a trout to have its neck broken by a fisherman

and then to be tossed into the creel or for a trout to die from

a fungus that crawls like sugar-colored ants over its body

until the trout is in death's sugarbowl.

 It is all right for a trout to be trapped in a pool that dries

up in the late summer or to be caught in the talons of a bird

or the claws of an animal.

 Yes, it is even all right for a trout to be killed by pollution,

to die in a river of suffocat...Read more of this...

by Heaney, Seamus
...m wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom...Read more of this...

by Jeffers, Robinson
...of the earth
Under men's hands and their minds,
The beautiful places killed like rabbits to make a city,
The spreading fungus, the slime-threads
And spores; my own coast's obscene future: I remember the farther
Future, and the last man dying
Without succession under the confident eyes of the stars.
It was only a moment's accident,
The race that plagued us; the world resumes the old lonely immortal
Splendor; from here I can even
Perceive that that snuffed candle had somet...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...them, poisoned the blood in their veins;
Burst with my winter upon them, searing forever their sight,
Lashed them with fungus-white faces, whimpering wild in the night;

"Staggering blind through the storm-whirl, stumbling mad through the snow,
Frozen stiff in the ice-pack, brittle and bent like a bow;
Featureless, formless, forsaken, scented by wolves in their flight,
Left for the wind to make music through ribs that are glittering white;
Gnawing the black crust of failure,...Read more of this...

by Blake, William
...the
darkness passes away
So I remaind with him sitting in the twisted [PL 18] root of
an oak. he was suspended in a fungus which hung with the head
downward into the deep:
By degrees we beheld the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke 
of a burning city; beneath us at an immense distance was the sun,
black but shining[;] round it were fiery tracks on which revolv'd
vast spiders, crawling after their prey; which flew or rather
swum in the infinite deep, in the most terrific s...Read more of this...

by Jackson, Helen Hunt
...id not seek and find 
Silent friendship from them all. 
Moss-cups, tiarella leaves, 
Dappld like the adder's skin, 
Fungus huts with ivory eaves 
Which the fairies harbor in, 
Regiments of fronded ferns, 
Golden-rod and asters frail, 
Every flaming leaf that burns 
Red against the autumn pale, 
Every pink-cupped wayside rose,-- 
All to her were dear and known; 
But above them all she chose 
Clover-blossoms for her own. 

So they laid her to her rest 
In the sun-warmed...Read more of this...

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