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“The Wild Iris” Introduction
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"The Wild Iris," first published in a 1992 collection of the same name, is Louise Glück's poem of death, rebirth, and transformation. The poem's speaker is an iris, a flower that has endured death and returned to tell the tale. Through the story of its seeming death and its new flowering in the spring, the iris offers its readers a mysterious hope: death, in this flower's experience, isn't an ending, but a stage in the ongoing process of life.
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“The Wild Iris” Summary
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When my suffering was over, I came to a door.
Listen to me: I remember going through the experience you call "death."
Up above me, I could hear little noises, like the sound of the pine trees moving in the wind. Then, there was nothing. Faint sunlight moved over the dried-out dirt.
It's an awful thing to still be conscious while you're buried underground.
Then my suffering ended: the part of death you're afraid of, being speechless but still conscious, stopped all of a sudden. I felt the tough ground around me starting to give, and I got the impression that there were little birds moving around in the nearby bushes.
Listen, you people who don't remember what it's like to come back from the dead: I'm telling you, I could talk again. Whatever comes back from death and nothingness discovers that it has a new ability to speak.
From right at the heart of my being, a huge fountain-like blossom shot up: as richly blue as a shadow on the waters of the sea.
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“The Wild Iris” Themes
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Death, Rebirth, and Transformation
In “The Wild Iris,” a personified iris assures its human readers that death isn’t the end of life: in fact, death is just a step in a mysterious transformation. Recounting its own experience of dying—and then being reborn with a whole new “voice”—the iris discovers that, while death is frightening, it’s also not infinite. In this poem, enduring the pain and fear of death is only the prelude to rebirth in a new and beautiful form.
Recounting its own experiences death and resurrection, the iris observes that “what you call death” isn’t an ending: it’s really only a dark passage that leads to “a door.” In dying, the iris indeed encounters “nothing” and “oblivion,” but after it’s retborn, it can remember all that nothingness: its “consciousness” is never really gone, even when it’s buried, frightened and alone in the ground. Death, in this iris’s view, is really just a stage of life. It’s not an ending, but a process.
And the process of death carries the iris through to a new life with new powers. Having spent time in the “other world” of death, the iris emerges with a new “voice”: an ability to communicate its experience. That voice appears in the form of a “great fountain”—the iris’s gorgeous deep-blue flower—and in the form of this very poem! Dying is what allows the iris to blossom again, and its blossoming is itself a “voice” of consolation to people who haven’t yet died, assuring them that death is only one stage of life.
The fear, darkness, and silence of death, this poem thus suggests, are just a prelude to a mysterious flowering, a stage on the journey toward a beautiful resurrection. People, this iris suggests, can thus meet “that which [they] fear” with patience and courage, knowing that the terrifying darkness of death (or perhaps even the darkness of experiences that echo death, like a deep depression) is never permanent.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-23
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Wild Iris”
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Lines 1-4
At the end ...
... I remember."The Wild Iris" begins with some bold claims, told in a mysterious first-person voice: a voice that claims to have died, and lived to tell the tale.
Not only has this speaker died and returned to life, they really, really want the reader to hear their story and to believe it. Listen to the urgency of the caesura and the enjambment in lines 3-4:
Hear me out: || that which you call death
I remember.That mid-line colon feels insistent, asking the reader to stop and really listen. Then, the enjambment sets off the strange idea that this speaker can "remember" their own death, giving this powerful declaration a whole line to itself.
Already, then, the reader has the sense that this speaker is someone who's been through an astonishing experience. And going through that experience has made them want to share it. This speaker wants to be heard, to communicate a powerful message: death isn't the end.
Take a look at the metaphor in the poem's very first lines:
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.If there's a "door" at the end of suffering, then suffering itself isn't an infinite void, or a devouring monster. Instead, it's something more like a dark hallway: a difficult passage to navigate, but still a passage, a thing that takes people from one place to another.
And the way these two first stanzas mirror each other—each is only two lines long, and each is a single enjambed sentence—suggests that the speaker's "suffering" and their "death" are one and the same. Death isn't pure oblivion, but a painful passage—a trial, not an ending.
In other words: to this speaker, pain and death aren't terrible and irreversible fates. They're part of an ongoing journey.
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Lines 5-7
Overhead, noises, branches ...
... the dry surface.
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Lines 8-10
It is terrible ...
... the dark earth. -
Lines 11-15
Then it was ...
... in low shrubs. -
Lines 16-20
You who do ...
... find a voice: -
Lines 21-23
from the center ...
... on azure seawater.
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“The Wild Iris” Symbols
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The Iris
This poem's iris doesn't just talk about rebirth—it symbolizes rebirth. Because they're some of the first plants to pop up in spring after the long dark winter, flowers are an ancient symbol of new life and resurrection. This iris seems to die, but, really, it's only waiting for its time to come to life again. That, this poem suggests, is how all life works: death isn't the end of life, it's just another stage of life.
The iris may also symbolize people's inner lives, which similarly move through cycles of light and dark, joy and sorrow. Even in a frightening or empty-feeling part of life, this iris's symbolism suggests, people can take courage in the thought that they'll one day "bloom" again.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 1-23
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“The Wild Iris” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Personification
Personification allows this poem's iris to speak directly to the reader, and hints that the flower's rebirth might also be an image of something that happens to humans.
This iris talks to its readers in the first person, remembering its experience of death and resurrection with a lot of detail and feeling. "It is terrible," it recalls, to be a "consciousness / buried in the dark earth." Moments like this make this poem work differently than other poems that use flowers as a symbol of rebirth. It's one thing for a poet to look at a flower and think, "How hopeful, flowers always come back in the spring!" It's quite another to imagine going through the harrowing, frightening experience of death while still "conscious[]," on the way to the spring. By allowing the iris to speak of its ordeal, personification allows the poem to explore the real terror and pain of undergoing a rebirth.
The iris's personification also suggests that people go through similar cycles of flowering and death, over and over. That might be true in a metaphorical sense: people endure grim periods of despair, feeling like they're "buried in the dark earth," only to emerge into the sunlight again. But perhaps this iris even offers hope that this is literally true: that death isn't the end, just a stage in an ongoing process of life.
Readers might even interpret this personified iris as the voice of the poet herself! When the iris talks to the reader, it seems to know that what the reader "fear[s]" is being conscious but mute—being "a soul and unable / to speak." This fear of being unable to speak might suggest a particularly poetic difficulty: the feeling of going through a period so dark that it's impossible even to write. The personified iris might speak for a poet who has suffered, but emerged to find her "voice"—a voice she'll use to share what she's discovered about life and death.
Personification thus makes the iris's experience seem deeply human.
Where personification appears in the poem:- Lines 1-4: “At the end of my suffering / there was a door. / Hear me out: that which you call death / I remember.”
- Lines 8-10: “It is terrible to survive / as consciousness / buried in the dark earth.”
- Lines 14-15: “And what I took to be / birds darting in low shrubs.”
- Line 18: “I tell you I could speak again:”
- Lines 21-22: “from the center of my life came / a great fountain,”
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Imagery
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Metaphor
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Asyndeton
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Enjambment
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Caesura
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Repetition
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“The Wild Iris” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Terrible
- Oblivion
- Azure
Terrible-
(Location in poem: Lines 8-9: “It is terrible to survive / as consciousness”)
Here, "terrible" doesn't just mean "really bad," but terrifying and awe-inspiring.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Wild Iris”
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Form
"The Wild Iris" is written in free verse, meaning it has no regular rhyme scheme or meter. Its ever-changing, varied lines are broken up into seven stanzas of all different lengths.
But there's a subtle pattern within those differing stanzas. The poem starts out with a couple of stanzas of only two lines, but then slowly swells: it gathers to stanzas of three lines, then five lines. Then, the very last stanza shrinks back to three lines again.
This gradual process of growth and diminishment mirrors exactly what the poem is about: the cycle of death and rebirth. Even as this iris remembers how "terrible" it was to be buried underground in lines 8-10 ("It is terrible [...] dark earth"), the poem's lines are starting to swell up, like a bud getting ready to send out a shoot. And in the final stanza, when the iris blooms in a "great fountain" of color, there's a sense of both triumph and peaking: the stanza length starts to shrink back again here, suggesting that the iris will again shrivel and die—and again be reborn.
This is one of the strengths of free verse! Rather than fitting her ideas into a particular form like the sonnet or the sestina, Glück here allows the shape of her poem to mirror its subject.
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Meter
"The Wild Iris" is written in free verse, so it doesn't use a regular meter. The lack of a steady rhythm helps to give this poem an organic, free-flowing quality—appropriate for a poem about the mysteries of life, death, and growth!
Free verse also allows the poem to play with rhythms and line lengths for effect. Take a look at the way that works in the second stanza, for instance:
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.This is a pretty dramatic declaration, and the speaker uses line lengths to make it feel even more powerful. The first, long line feels like a building drumroll: the iris even starts out by saying "Hear me out," letting readers know that something amazing (and maybe hard to believe) is coming. And when the iris finally drops that amazing idea—that it "remember[s]" death—it does so in a line of just two words, so short and firm that it falls like the sudden crash of a cymbal.
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Rhyme Scheme
"The Wild Iris" is written in free verse, which means it doesn't use a rhyme scheme. Instead, it creates its music through other patterns of sound.
For instance, take a look at the subtle, varied assonance, consonance, and sibilance in the poem's final stanza:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.There are just a few dashes of similar sound here: the long /i/ of "my life," the /ee/ of "came / a great." And the final line uses a spectrum of sibilance: the /sh/, /z/, and /s/ sounds here belong to the same family, but don't match perfectly. These little grace notes give this passage a delicate music, highlighting the rich imagery of the fountain-like blossom.
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“The Wild Iris” Speaker
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The speaker of "The Wild Iris" is the titular iris itself: a plant that has seen some things. This iris has been through death and returned to tell the tale. It remembers the terror of being buried in the darkness—but also the "door" at the end of its ordeal. Emerging from the dark underground, it produces "a great fountain," a metaphor for both its beautiful blue blossom and the "voice" that speaks this very poem. This iris undergoes a real metamorphosis: surviving death makes it both wise and beautiful.
In some sense, this iris might be the poet herself: a person who has gone through dark times only to emerge with a new "voice," an ability to share what she's learned through her suffering.
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“The Wild Iris” Setting
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"The Wild Iris" is set outdoors, though whether in a wilderness or a garden is difficult to say. The iris itself doesn't seem to make distinctions like that! But it does take note of "the pine" over its head, the birds in the "low shrubs" around it, and the exact texture of the "stiff earth" it's buried in.
In other words, the setting of this poem is nature from a flower's-eye view. Planted in one spot, this iris sees the tree above it, not just as a pine, but as the pine, the singular tree it knows. And it experiences different qualities of "flickering" sunlight and "dry" or "stiff" earth like a connoisseur. The iris's world is both small and rich.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Wild Iris”
Literary Context
The American poet Louise Glück first published "The Wild Iris" in a 1992 collection named after this very poem. The Wild Iris explores some of Glück's favorite themes: divided into poems spoken by flowers, poems spoken by a gardener, and poems spoken by the voice of an omniscient God, the book looks at the relationship between nature, humanity, and the divine. Glück won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for this collection.
Like the poetry of Alice Oswald and the short stories of Angela Carter, Glück's poems often draw on mythology and folklore and their connections to the natural world. "The Wild Iris," for instance, might be inflected by the Persephone myth, in which Hades (the god of the underworld) kidnaps Persephone (daughter of the earth goddess Demeter), causing a deathly winter to fall upon the world as Demeter mourns for her lost daughter. When Persephone returns to the world's surface to visit her mother, spring comes. Glück's collection Averno (2006) centers on this myth, reflecting her enduring interest in the cycle of death and rebirth—and her sense of both the intense pain and the stunning beauty of that cycle.
Glück published her first book in 1968, and became an important and influential poet: she served as the U.S. Poet Laureate in 2003-04, and in 2020, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She died in 2023.
Historical Context
The Wild Iris, the collection this poem comes from, draws on Glück's own experiences as a writer and a gardener. The book follows a year in the life of a garden based on Glück's own Vermont backyard (though it could also be an every-garden, an archetypal place where humanity lives in harmony with nature—or tries to). And like plenty of poets before her, Glück saw her garden as a mirror for a whole range of human experiences.
Glück's poetry often examines her inner life, and the iris's "terrible" period of "consciousness / buried in the dark earth" can be read as the words of an artist intimately familiar with despair. This iris, like a deeply depressed person, endures the terrifying feeling of being dead and alive at once—"conscious[]" and thinking, but able to see only "oblivion."
Glück's own struggles with her mental health might have informed both the claustrophobic intensity of this iris's death and its eventual triumphant blossoming. Glück suffered from a severe case of anorexia as a young woman, and underwent years of therapy. But like this iris, she emerged "to find a voice": her suffering, too, gave birth to a "great fountain" of poetry.
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More “The Wild Iris” Resources
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External Resources
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Louise Glück's life and work at the Poetry Foundation.
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Glück's Influence — Read an appreciation of Glück's work in the New Yorker.
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Glück's Reception — Read about Glück's recent work and honors (including the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature).
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to Glück herself reading this poem aloud.
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An Interview with Glück — Listen to an interview with Glück (conducted by the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín).
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Louise Glück
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