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“The Wild Iris” is the first poem in the book-length work, The Wild Iris, which features a sequence of poems that all take place in the same garden. Although the larger context of The Wild Iris gives the reader a fuller sense of the setting, if we take our cues solely from the poem itself, it isn’t immediately obvious what the setting is. This lack of clarity stems in part from the fact that the poem has a nonhuman speaker who perceives the world in a completely different way. What may look like a garden from a human perspective is all the wild iris knows of the world. For them, the garden just is the world. They perceive this world in a fragmentary way, with an emphasis on the shifting of shadow and light. They indicate as much in lines 5–7:

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. 

Then nothing. The weak sun 

flickered over the dry surface.

Aside from this passage and a later reference to “birds darting in low shrubs” (line 15), the speaker offers no other explicit descriptions of the setting. But for the speaker, what’s most significant about the garden isn’t how it looks. Instead, this is the place where they experience the fullness of the life cycle: dying back in the autumn, overwintering in the cold ground, and blooming anew in the spring.

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