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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Natural Imagery

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a work called “The Wild Iris,” images of the natural world feature as an important motif throughout. The natural imagery in the poem partly functions to establish a vision of the speaker’s garden setting. For instance, the speaker describes their surroundings in lines 5–7:

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. 

Then nothing. The weak sun 

flickered over the dry surface.

The imagery provided in these lines offers a fragmentary sense of how the wild iris “sees” the world, mainly through the delicate shifting of light. Two stanzas later, the speaker references the natural world again. There, they describe the experience of spring’s return, which softens the earth and allows it to “[bend] a little” (line 14). As they push their way up through the soil, they make note of the goings-on above the surface: “what I took to be / birds darting in low shrubs” (lines 14–15). The speaker deploys natural imagery one last time in lines 21–23:

from the center of my life came 

a great fountain, deep blue 

shadows on azure seawater.

Here, the speaker describes their internal experience through an enigmatic description of “a great fountain” that emanates “from the center of [their] life.” The “deep blue / shadows on azure seawater” could be interpreted as a quasi-spiritual image—one that captures the iris’s sense of its vital life force returning in the spring.

Being versus Nothingness

As a poem that engages with matters of life and death, a central motif in “The Wild Iris” relates to the opposition between being and nothingness. The poem’s botanical speaker addresses a human reader who seems to have a rigid understanding that equates life with being. Death, by contrast, means the end of being. That is, dying means to forfeit being and become nothing. But the wild iris has a radically different perspective on life and death. According to this perspective, life and death are both part of being. Death is not an irreversible passage out of being and into nothingness. Rather, it is a transitional period of “oblivion” that eventually emerges back into life. The speaker explains as much in lines 16–20:

You who do not remember 

passage from the other world 

I tell you I could speak again: whatever 

returns from oblivion returns 

to find a voice.

These lines emphasize that death is an “other world” characterized by loss of memory and awareness (i.e., “oblivion”). Beings travel to this world, but then return to the world of the living. And there, they find a new voice and renewed life.

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