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Glück wrote “The Wild Iris” in free verse, which means that the poem doesn’t have a regular meter. Instead, each line of the poem has a different length and exhibits a different pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. The use of free verse gives the poem a naturalistic style that, to some ears at least, may seem closer to prose than to poetry. Although Glück doesn’t force metrical regularity on her language, she does use punctuation to manage the poem’s pace and rhythm. As an example, consider lines 5–10:

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. 

Then nothing. The weak sun 

flickered over the dry surface.

 

It is terrible to survive 

as consciousness 

buried in the dark earth.

Begin by noting that the first stanza of this passage is much more heavily punctuated. The use of commas and periods gives these lines a slower and more deliberate quality. By contrast, the second stanza consists of a single, unpunctuated sentence that flows freely from one line to the next. When read aloud, it becomes clear how the presence or absence of punctuation helps regulate the pace of the language, slowing down here and speeding up there. Thus, despite not following a regular meter, Glück nonetheless invests her language with rhythmic complexity.

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