Sometimes a mushroom is really just a mushroom...

 Welcome again gentle readers. Today I shall regale you with exciting tales of the joys, the dangerous and numerous frustrations of attempting to teach one of life's great literary mysteries - poetry.

To some of us poetry is a breath of fresh air as sweet as a pale spring morning. A robust wine to be imbibed, to be savoured and swirled about the mouth, to infuse the mind with great relevations of the human condition and the inner workings of the soul.

Many others feel that poems are something best avoided unless they are a humourous limerick preferably beginning with a line such as "There once was a girl from Nantucket..."

However, the powers-that-be have ordained that all students must be instructed in the appreciation of poetry. Perhaps, you may argue, this is essential knowledge. It may be all very well for English teachers to shy away from the rigours of teaching poetry but where would this leave the students? Imagine a world, you may argue, where grown men and women are ignorant and defenceless in the face of poetry. A world where accountants could add a considerable sum of figures but are stumped as a Christmas tree in December when it comes to similes. A world where silver-tongued lawyers are reduced to babbling by the utterance of onomatopoeia. A world where steel-nerved surgeons are frozen with terror in the operating theatre by presence of a metaphor.

"No!" I hear you cry. This can not be! Educated people cannot be undone by these poetic devices. They must be able to conquer, to arm themselves against language of the figurative kind.

Thus inspired by the necessity of this Herculean task, I set out to teach these young minds about poetry. To cram into their little minds the knowledge they would need should they in latter life perchance to come face to face with a sonnet.

I taught them all the metaphors and all the similes
The assonance, the consonance, were pointed out with ease.
I looked at every stanza and at every single rhyme,
The structure and the metre took quite a lot of time.

Once I'd taught them all the terms and noted each device,
One student raised their hand and asked for some advice,
"I have underlined the features and written down the theme,
But could you tell me Miss, what does this poem mean?"

I was nearly undone.

However, being of staunch of mind and of spirit, I pressed on. For hours, it seemed, we covered the purpose of the poetry, the hidden meanings, the truths to be gleaned from the text. We looked at 'No ordinary sun' - how the sun is _really_ an atomic bomb.

Then, today, we read another poem, 'Mushrooms' by Sylvia Plath. The poem was rich in imagery and language but not too difficult. This one, I fancied, they could read and understand all by themselves. They read it. They noted many features.

"Repetition," one remarked.

"Metaphor," another called out.

I felt well-pleased with my work.

Then, to my horror and dismay, the dreaded question raised its loathsome head.

"Miss, what is it about?"

"Mushrooms," I replied.

The murmur in the room was one of discontent.

"No really, Miss, what is it actually about," another student demanded.

"Mushrooms. It is really about mushrooms," I repeated.

They looked at each other suspiciously.

"What are the mushrooms, though," tried another student tackling the problem from another angle.

"The mushrooms are mushrooms. That is what the poem is about. It is called mushrooms and it is about mushrooms!"

"That is stupid. You can't just have a poem about mushrooms. It has to be about something else!"

If anyone has any ideas about what the mushrooms actually represent, my students would be grateful. Mushrooms are not, apparently, interesting enough in themselves to warrant a poem.