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Emily DickinsonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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.
By Emily Dickinson
A Bird, came down the Walk
Emily Dickinson
A Clock stopped—
Emily Dickinson
A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)
Emily Dickinson
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Emily Dickinson
"Faith" is a fine invention
Emily Dickinson
Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
Emily Dickinson
Hope is a strange invention
Emily Dickinson
"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers
Emily Dickinson
I Can Wade Grief
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
Emily Dickinson
If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking
Emily Dickinson
If I should die
Emily Dickinson
If you were coming in the fall
Emily Dickinson
I heard a Fly buzz — when I died
Emily Dickinson
I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
Emily Dickinson
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
Emily Dickinson
Success Is Counted Sweetest
Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Emily Dickinson
The Only News I Know
Emily Dickinson