“The Wild Iris” has a delicate structure that may best be understood as a meditation. The term meditation is typically associated with an intentional practice of mental focus. However, the word can also refer to a written or spoken discourse that expresses well-considered thoughts on a particular subject. It is this latter sense of meditation that applies to “The Wild Iris,” which features a botanical speaker who offers their considered thoughts on the mystery of death. Significantly, the speaker doesn’t present their discussion of death and its relation to life in a rigorously organized argument. Instead, they pursue their theme in a somewhat meandering and fragmentary way. For instance, consider the progression of the speaker’s thoughts in lines 3–10:

Hear me out: that which you call death 

I remember.

 

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.

The first stanza here features a direct address to the reader, and the speaker makes an explicit reference to death. In the second passage, the speaker shifts away from death and instead offers a fragmentary image of their place in the garden. The speaker then returns to the matter of death in the third stanza, but they no longer seem to address us readers directly. The speaker continues in this meandering, meditative way throughout the rest of the poem.