Frank Oliver Call, a Canadian poet and professor of modern languages, wrote “Japanese Iris” in the early twentieth century, when Western literature and painting were strongly shaped by the elegance of Japanese art. Call was born in Quebec and spent much of his life as an educator, and his poetry often moves between local landscapes and wider imaginative worlds. This lyric grows out of that Japonisme, but it also feels intimate rather than merely decorative. It presents a small, sorrowful legend of separation and then finds the legend alive again among flowers in a northern garden.
The opening lines move like a folktale: “A great prince of the ancient days / Once loved a little geisha girl,” whose silken robe was “Blue as the waters of the lily-pond.” The contrast between the “great” prince and the “little” geisha girl gives the relationship a delicate imbalance, while the blue robe links her to a specific, dreamlike landscape. When the prince is sent to a distant island, the poem compresses loss into one restrained gesture: she “Never put on her robe of blue again.” That finality feels like a kind of grief that needs no elaboration. Then the speaker turns directly to the irises and announces that the purple iris with golden bands carries the soul of the prince, while the slender blue iris carries the soul of the dancing-girl. In the final lines, the two flowers “nestle at last” beside each other, so the ancient lovers are reunited not in Japan but in the speaker’s own garden. The central idea is not simply that love survives exile; it is that beauty migrates, transforms, and takes root in an unexpected place.
The poem’s construction supports that quiet transformation. It uses free verse with no regular rhyme scheme, and its lines stretch and shrink like breath. The first half, with its past-tense narrative, has a sparse, translated quality. The second half changes tense and address: “And you, O purple iris…” and “And you, O slender one…” create a direct, almost prayerful encounter between the speaker and the flowers. This repetition gives the poem a sense of ritual. The long line “Here in the sunshine of my northern garden” breaks the Japanese setting and brings the legend into the present. The absence of rhyme and strict meter keeps the poem from feeling stiff or overly polished; instead, it sounds like a memory retold with care.
Colour and imagery do much of the emotional work. Blue appears first as the girl’s robe, then as the waters of the lily-pond, and finally as lapis lazuli in the iris. The precious stone makes the flower’s blue feel both rare and alive. Purple and gold belong to the prince, suggesting royalty and grandeur. The phrase “golden bands” is especially vivid, as if the iris has been painted or crowned. Words such as “silken,” “slender,” “stately,” and “nestle” are gentle and physical, so the flowers seem less like symbols on a page than like actual presences. The speaker’s “northern garden” is deliberately unromantic compared with the ancient Japanese setting, yet the poem treats it as a fitting meeting place. That is part of what makes “Japanese Iris” significant: it does not keep the “exotic” story at a safe distance. Instead, it lets the legend inhabit a Canadian garden, suggesting that stories and griefs can bloom far from their origins. What remains is a garden where loss has turned into colour, sunlight, and companionship.