We Grow Accustomed to the Dark

Like all of Emily Dickinson’s untitled poems, “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark” takes its title from the very first line (the title can be given title casing or adhere to its stylistic sentence casing as it appears in the text). The poem opens with the pronoun “We” (Line 1), introducing its unconventional fourth-person narrative perspective. The fourth-person voice is used to represent a collective consciousness: a group of people, a community, and identity, or humanity as a whole. In this instance the speaker is using “We” to refer not only to themselves and the reader symbiotically, but to human nature as a broader whole.

In the first stanza, several mid-sentence words are given capitalization: “Dark,” “Light,” “Neighbor,” “Lamp,” and “Goodbye” (Lines 1-4). When read aloud, this capitalization encourages the oral reader to linger on these particular words and give them extra emphasis; likely the poet was trying to make these keywords stand out from the rest of the text as signposts for the underlying themes.

The opening stanza uses three em-dashes across four lines, which creates an erratic and uncertain momentum that mirrors the speaker’s uncertainty. These breaks at the end of each line suggest that the speaker is stopping, starting, stumbling, and pausing in each moment of their new journey.