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Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

The Wild Iris

Though only ever named in the title, the wild iris stands as the poem’s central symbol for the continuity of transformation and the promise of rebirth. The iris is a “perennial” flower. In ordinary usage, perennial refers to things that exist or endure for a very long time. In the specific context of botany, the word refers to plants whose bulbs survive the winter to bloom again in the spring. In “The Wild Iris,” Glück allows this perennial flower to describe their experience of death in winter and resurrection in spring. From their botanical point of view, the iris perceives death as just another passage in the ongoing process of transformation: from life to death and back to life again. The speaker offers this account of their return from “oblivion” (line 19) to alleviate the fears of their human reader, who apparently worries that death is an absolute ending to consciousness. On the contrary, instead of being an absolute end, death offers a new kind of beginning.

Door

In the opening lines of the poem, the speaker references death through the symbol of a door: “At the end of my suffering / there was a door” (lines 1–2). In the English-speaking world, there is a long tradition of using the image of a door to symbolize death. This tradition has become so familiar that we often say that a dying person is “knocking at death’s door.” Doorways are thresholds that mark the passage from one space to another. Likewise, death is frequently imagined as a passage out of the realm we know (i.e., life) and into another realm, whose dimensions remain mysterious to us. Although using a door to symbolize death is very conventional, and may even border on the cliché, what’s significant about the door in this poem has to do with the speaker. The speaker of “The Wild Iris” is, in fact, a flower. The whole poem is organized around this plant’s botanical point of view, which differs in important ways from a typical human perspective. And yet, despite these crucial differences, the speaker uses a very human symbol to address the subject of death, demonstrating the iris’s sensitivity to their human addressee.

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