Love should grow up like a wild iris field in the fields. by susan griffin

The poem “ Love Should Grow Up Like a Wild Iris in the Fields” follows the tradition of the romantic poets in its effort to equate love with nature. The poet speaks of a love that is unexpected, yet desired by everyone, a love that should not be bound by the ugliness and death that surrounds it, but forget its own beginning and live for the present moment, because like all life, happiness is fleeting and one must grab it and never let go. In today’s fast paced society, being close to nature is almost impossible, which is why the author moves the dwelling place of love from a field to a kitchen of a family which struggles to survive, which counts every penny as if it was their last one, whose child cries in hunger while the mother soothes it with promises of food to come. Love has lost its magic, but not its worth. It takes on the commonness of normal life: “ goes on from day to day… gets taken to the cleaners every fall, sings old songs over and over again.” The poet ends the poem by restating her first stanza, only giving it a different ending: “ Love… comes from the midst of everything else,” meaning that the modern world might have killed the magical element of love, but it does not mean love is not as important, as present and as valuable in the lives of people whose pace of life does not give them the opportunity to “ stop and smell the roses.” The most important symbols the poet uses are nature, the hungry child and the kitchen. Everything in nature has its life cycle, its beginning and end. Nature lives in the present, it has no thoughts of the future to come nor worries what it will bring, happiness or sorrow. The poet states that love should exist in the same manner, oblivious to the “ graveyard of leaves” around it and should embrace its own potential to give life meaning and happiness. The hungry child could be perceived as the result of a deep emotional connection between two people, that is, it could epitomize love itself. The fact that it is hungry, symbolizes its need to be taken care of, it wants others to pay more attention to it. The kitchen could be perceived as a modern day prison for love “ where the walls record movements,” because it cannot free itself of the dinners whose participants are tired out and hungry, stuck in a never ending cycle of working for food and eating to be able to work yet again. Though these aspects of love seem bleak, the ending of facing up to the skies offers consolation and urges us to look for love, because they it is around us. All we need to do is look straight into its face and embrace it.