Scale goes wrong from the first line. The "field" of Morris's opening stanza is "magical," yet it is full of "giant mountains and leaves." That is the vantage point of something tiny, an insect or a child, for whom a garden has become a landscape. Nobody is named as doing the "hiding" or the "seeking." The stanza has no grammatical subject, so the reader has to supply one. The "love" being sought sits beside a "dark fountain of / Rotten banquets and thieves," a phrase that turns an image of freshness into something stagnant. The stanza's only full rhyme, "leaves" and "thieves," frames it neatly and ties the lush to the criminal. Nature here is a feast and an ambush at once.
The second stanza moves from setting to teaching. Two figures compete to shape "young minds": a "mystical lioness" and a "tyrant hyena." The lioness feeds her charges "sparkling ladybirds," pretty and harmless, but also "meat coated in pollen," an unsettling phrase in which sweetness is dusted over something carnivorous. Even the gentle teacher offers a softened version of the predator's world. The hyena is blunter. It teaches the young "to slay / With a venomous sting," though a hyena has no sting, which belongs to wasps and scorpions. The image is impossible, and that seems to be the point. The poem runs on dream logic, mixing savanna animals with garden creatures until the two worlds blur. Then comes the flattest line of the poem: "The lioness are fallen." The verb refuses to agree with its noun. That might be a slip, or a deliberate plural suggesting a whole line of protectors gone. Either way, "fallen" carries more than death. It hints at a fall from grace, and the stanza ends with the tyrant unopposed.
Nothing in the poem is punctuated, and the lines hang on small connecting words ("field of," "fountain of," "Feeding young minds with," "ladybirds and"). The reader tips forward from line to line without pausing for breath. There is no regular metre, and line length swings from the two beats of "Seeking love" to the drawn-out "Teaching young to slay." After the one rhyme in the first stanza, rhyme disappears, so the later stanzas feel loosened from the order the opening had. Sound does some of the work instead. Hard, clipped words like "slay" and "sting" sit in the stanza of violence, while the final stanza turns to soft l-sounds in "Love," "clouds" and "Looking," which seem to lift the voice.
The title image appears only in that last stanza. "Strawberry mushrooms" is a hybrid. A strawberry is sweetness, while a mushroom grows from decay, so the phrase holds both halves of the poem's world in two words. They are "floating through the sky," and the verb comes as a release after the heaviness of the middle. "Love found in the clouds" answers the earlier "Seeking love," but note where it is found: not in the field, with its rot and thieves, but above it. One reading, and it is only a reading, is that love survives by rising out of the place where the young are taught to slay. The final line, "Looking down on the passing," ends with no noun and no full stop. Passing what: time, generations, the fallen? The sentence drifts off as the mushrooms do, and whether the view from above is peace or coldness is left open.
The poem is worth reading for the way it borrows the furniture of a children's story (ladybirds, lionesses, strawberries) to sketch something much darker. It suggests that the young are shaped by tenderness and cruelty together, and that beauty can be a coating over harm. It does not moralise or explain. Its roughness, from the odd grammar to the mismatched animals, suits a world where the rules of nature and teaching have come loose. The reader is left with a strange, memorable picture and a real question: is floating away a rescue, or a way of not looking at what is left behind?