Wild Iris Essay Questions

Describe the speakers in The Wild Iris.

The poems in the collection are written from the perspectives of three different kinds of speakers: plants (mostly flowers), a human that can be referred to as the gardener-poet, and a deity. The speakers from the plant kingdom include the Wild Iris, Trillium, Lamium, Snowdrops, Scilla, the Hawthorn Tree, Violets, Witchgrass, Field Flowers, the Red Poppy, Clover, Daisies, the White Rose, Ipomoea, the Silver Lily, the Gold Lily, and the White Lilies. Flowers are the first and last speakers in the collection. Often, they address the gardener-poet and provide general insights into humanity as a whole. For example, Snowdrops describes the way it pushes through frozen, snow-covered ground, and compares this to the metaphorical winter of human despair giving way to a new world.

All of the prayer poems entitled "Matins" and "Vespers" are told from the point of view of the gardener-poet as she addresses the deity. This speaker is often concerned with the lack of discernible response from God. She looks for these responses in the natural world. For example, in "Matins" (#3), the speaker asks whether the deity is like the hawthorn tree or the foxglove. The deity itself speaks through different forms; these include a Clear Morning, Spring Snow, the End of Winter, Retreating Wind, April, Midsummer, End of Summer, Early Darkness, Harvest, Retreating Light, Sunset, Lullaby, and September Twilight.

The speakers (and thus the poems) are in conversation with one another.

Describe the human characters introduced in the poems.

One of the three primary speakers in this collection is the gardener-poet. This gardener-poet should not necessarily be understood as Glück herself, but as a persona through which Glück explores the threads of mental health, faith, and interpersonal relationships. For example, in the first "Matins" poem, the speaker notes her depression, but describes her awareness and sense of being in her life as "passionately / attached to the living tree." She arrives at this description through a conversation with someone named Noah.

Noah is a character who appears in just a few poems. He is in conversation with the speaker in "Matins" (#1), discussing the way that depressed people relate to the natural world. He also is briefly mentioned in "Vespers" (#1) as the speaker describes the difficulty of sharing her tomato harvest. Noah is the name of Glück's son, born in 1973, which demonstrates the way she relies on the personal details of her life in her poems. The name Noah also carries a biblical connotation, as Noah was the name of the man in the Book of Genesis who built the ark that survived the flood.

John is the third human character in The Wild Iris. He appears in the poem "Song," objecting to the speaker's description of a wild rose. This portrays him as a person grounded in the literal—unlike the gardener-poet, he has no use for metaphors. In "Heaven and Earth," John is revealed to be the gardener-poet's husband, and the lines hint at a conflict between the two. Because of the way Glück engages with enjambment, one line reads, "How can I leave my husband." The conflict between them appears again in "Vespers" (#4), where the speaker uses a slightly accusatory tone in commenting that God accompanies John in the garden. In every poem in which John is mentioned, he disagrees with or experiences something differently than the speaker.

Give an example in which a voice in one poem speaks to a voice in another. How does this relate to the collection and to Glück's writing as a whole?

In the second "Matins" poem, the gardener-poet addresses God as an "Unreachable father," and recounts the history of human exile from heaven. She maps human worship in accordance with human despair, stating that humans didn't understand the lesson they were meant to be learning. In the first poem in which the divine voice speaks ("Clear Morning"), the deity is discontented at this human lack of understanding. The final lines of the poem read, "I am prepared now to force / clarity upon you," alluding to the collection's thesis of spiritual understanding.

How does the first poem frame the entire collection?

"The Wild Iris" is the titular first poem that establishes the collection's concern with suffering, faith, and transformation. This poem lets the reader know that this collection will contain more-than-human speakers. In the context of Glück's life, this poem broke a two-year period of writer's block, and thus marked an important time in her creative life. The lines "At the end of my suffering / there was a door" had echoed in Glück's head during the two-year period in which she could not write, and thus it is significant that they introduce the collection. The act of creation through writing is part of this "door" that will lead to the speaker's personal transformation. The "oblivion" discussed by the Wild Iris is the creative death that Glück experienced, but readers can apply it to any context of suffering in their own lives. This establishes the collection as both deeply personal to Glück's life, but also universally relevant.

Compare the way that the Wild Iris talks about "oblivion" in "The Wild Iris" to the way in which the deity discusses "the void" in the poem "End of Summer."

In "The Wild Iris," the flower recounts the terror of oblivion: of "[surviving] / as consciousness / buried in the dark earth." This death is defined as "that which you fear," with "you" referring to human beings. This speaks to the instinctual fear of death, extinction, and obscurity that conscious beings feel. The death in question could be physical or metaphorical. For the flower, this death is part of its literal life cycle. But for Glück herself, this refers to her two-year writer's block (the metaphorical death and rebirth of her creative life).

The fear that living beings have of physical and metaphorical death as established in "The Wild Iris" is differentiated from "the void" in the poem "End of Summer." Here, the deity says, "After all things occurred to me, / the void occurred to me." The deity has "no need / of shelter outside" itself, which for earthly beings would be a terrible experience, according to the Wild Iris. Instead, the divine speaker in "End of Summer" urges humans to open their eyes and see God everywhere, not just in specific instances "disguised as matter."