Spare, Dark, Striking
One of the many things Plath was good at was creating dark, intense images with only a few well-chosen words. This spare and striking style is on full display in "Mushrooms." Just check out this stanza if you don't believe us:
Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air. (4-6)
See how she uses the imagery of toes and noses to bring to mind the caps of mushrooms? Not only is it a cool way to get across the lumpy shape of mushrooms, the use of human body parts also gives us a hint that these fungi might just represent people. When she says that they "Acquire the air" we can almost feel them breathing. It takes a poet of no small skill to come up with tight, evocative stanzas like this. The entire poem is full of this kind of stuff. "Mushrooms" is only one of the many examples of Plath's amazing ability to conjure precise, loaded imagery with just the right words. For more of this good stuff, we recommend "Mirror" and "Daddy."