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Overview
“The Wild Iris” is a poem by the American Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück
. The poem, which opens Glück’s 1992 collection of the same title, is written from the perspective of a flower. This flower—the wild iris of the title—has survived the harsh winter and now blossoms back into life. By personifying the flower and allowing it to tell its own story, Glück offers a speculative account of how a botanical being might experience the phenomenon of death. Death, for the iris, isn’t an absolute ending; it’s simply a matter of rebirth.Read a summary & analysis, an analysis of the speaker, and explanations of important quotes from “The Wild Iris.”
