The Wild Iris

Study Guide

Literary Devices

Tone

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Literary Devices Tone

“The Wild Iris” has a tone best characterized as serene and accepting. This tone is partially expressed through the poem’s speaker: the titular wild iris. Throughout the poem, the speaker seems keen to reassure their human readers that death is not an abrupt end to life. Although it may appear to be so from our limited human perspective, from their botanical point of view, death is just another stage in a continuous process of transformation. The wild iris wants us to adopt their nonhuman point of view in order to embrace a more accepting view of death. Accepting rather than fearing death will, in turn, lead to greater serenity in life. In subtle ways, Glück echoes the content speaker’s message on the level of form. Consider the use of enjambment, for instance. Enjambment (en-JAM-ment) refers to the technique in which one poetic line flows to the next without stopping. Just as the poem’s continuity isn’t disrupted by the end of each line, so too is death not the end of the line for life. In this way, the poem’s form subtly coaches us readers into the same attitude of serenity and acceptance that the wild iris attempts to cultivate in us.