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The Full Text of “We grow accustomed to the Dark”
1We grow accustomed to the Dark —
2When Light is put away —
3As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
4To witness her Goodbye —
5A Moment — We Uncertain step
6For newness of the night —
7Then — fit our Vision to the Dark —
8And meet the Road — erect —
9And so of larger — Darknesses —
10Those Evenings of the Brain —
11When not a Moon disclose a sign —
12Or Star — come out — within —
13The Bravest — grope a little —
14And sometimes hit a Tree
15Directly in the Forehead —
16But as they learn to see —
17Either the Darkness alters —
18Or something in the sight
19Adjusts itself to Midnight —
20And Life steps almost straight.
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“We grow accustomed to the Dark” Introduction
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"We grow accustomed to the Dark" was written by the American poet Emily Dickinson around 1862. The poem speaks to the human capacity for survival and resilience in the face of hardship and uncertainty, something the speaker metaphorically compares to stumbling around in the dark until one's eyes adjust to the lack of light. The speaker deems the "Bravest" people to be those willing to accept—and embrace—life's "darknesses." And those who accept the darkness, the poem suggests, start to find it a little less frightening.
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“We grow accustomed to the Dark” Summary
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We get used to darkness when the light disappears—like, for example, when a neighbor briefly holds up a lamp as she says her goodbyes.
Once the light is gone, we hesitate for a moment, and step uncertainly into the new darkness of the night. But soon enough, our eyes adjust, and we hit the road, standing tall.
The same is true of difficult times in life, which challenge us with a bigger (and less literal) form of darkness: those dark nights of the mind, when no guiding light, like the moon or stars, reveals itself.
The most courageous people venture clumsily into those darknesses, sometimes banging into a tree with their foreheads. Soon enough, though, they get used to the dark.
Then the darkness itself changes—or, perhaps, our eyes adjust to this metaphorical midnight. Then people find a way through life that is almost straight.
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“We grow accustomed to the Dark” Themes
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Human Courage and Resilience
“We Grow Accustomed to the Dark” is a testament to human courage and resilience. Just as people’s eyes adjust to their new surroundings after turning off a light, people themselves will learn to find their way through metaphorically dark times (which might refer to moments of great pain or to confrontations with the unknown). In other words, though life can often be hard, people can persevere through all manner of difficulties. The poem also subtly implies that people should accept that such difficulties are simply part of life—and are, in fact, important to our growth.
The "larger [...] Darknesses" of life might refer to times of intense grief, loss, doubt, or fear; the speaker might also be talking about times when people must step forward into an uncertain, or "dark," future. What's clear is that such darkness is inevitable, something "We"—that is, all human beings—have to face.
Navigating this darkness without any "Moon" nor "Star"—that is, without any guidance to show the way—may be upsetting and disorientating. But just like you can't have light without darkness, you can't have courage without a little fear. What's important, the speaker implies, is that people take that first, tentative step into the "night"—even if they can't be sure they're heading in the right direction. This might mean facing one's fears, dealing with trauma, or simply embracing the fact that the future is impossible to predict. Whatever one's personal "darkness" may be, the speaker has faith that one can find one's way through it.
The "Bravest" of all, the speaker says, "grope" (or blindly feel) their way along until their eyes adjust to their new surroundings. They might accidentally smack their head into a branch on the journey (a metaphor for coming up against an obstacle), but they will, the speaker says, "learn to see."
The poem thus celebrates perseverance through hardship and uncertainty, while also encouraging people to confront their pain and fear slowly but directly. When met with such courage, “the Darkness alters,” or “something in the sight” becomes adapted to that darkness. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s a person's sight or the darkness itself that changes; what matters is that life becomes more bearable—a little less dark—through this simple act of bravery and acceptance. No longer groping around blindly, "Life" can step “almost straight”; people will be able to move forward with confidence and integrity.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “We grow accustomed to the Dark”
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Lines 1-4
We grow accustomed to the Dark —
When Light is put away —
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye —The poem opens with the word "We." Already, the reader knows that the speaker is making a universal statement about humanity: that everyone "grow[s]" grow accustomed to the Dark / When Light is put away." That is, everyone gets used to darkness when the light is gone.
Nowadays, people are more used to turning a light off than putting it away—so in line 2, the reader might imagine the neighbor holding, not an electric porch light, but an old-fashioned handheld kerosene lamp (like this). The speaker imagines this neighbor holding this lamp up to say goodnight, and then leaving—taking the light of the lantern with her.
Think about how your eyes slowly adjust when you're standing in a dark room—from not being able to see at all, to slowly making out shapes. That's what the speaker is describing, but applying it to human experience in general, not just eyesight.
In literature, light usually stands for knowledge, warmth, and understanding, while darkness often represents opposite qualities—fear, sadness, the unknown, and so on. This symbolism is important to making sense of the poem.
It's not so easy to make one's way through that kind of darkness! Dickinson's characteristic dashes at the end of lines 1, 2, and 4 make the poem feel a little tentative, as though it is fumbling about in the dark to find its footing.
It's also worth noting how the poem offers no information about the neighbor's identity—nor, in fact, that of the person she bids farewell. This lack of specifics gives the poem a mysterious atmosphere, and helps readers understand that this opening scene isn't meant to be taken literally. Instead, the speaker is using an extended metaphor that compares human resilience through tough times to the way that people's eyes adjust to darkness.
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Lines 5-8
A Moment — We Uncertain step
For newness of the night —
Then — fit our Vision to the Dark —
And meet the Road — erect —
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Lines 9-12
And so of larger — Darknesses —
Those Evenings of the Brain —
When not a Moon disclose a sign —
Or Star — come out — within — -
Lines 13-16
The Bravest — grope a little —
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead —
But as they learn to see — -
Lines 17-20
Either the Darkness alters —
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight —
And Life steps almost straight.
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“We grow accustomed to the Dark” Symbols
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The Neighbor
The neighbor of the first stanza symbolizes human contact and connection—a warmth that stands in contrast to the cold darkness of suffering. Even though the poem uses "We" throughout, there's definitely something isolated about the image of people stepping out into literal and/or metaphorical darkness, and this "neighbor" saying her "Goodbye" suggests that the poem's "we" approaches the darkness very much alone.
The word "neighbor" itself echoes the biblical commandment "love thy neighbor"—and love is often depicted as a kind of light, like the neighbor's lantern, illuminating with the darker parts of the human experience. That said, the fact that the neighbor doesn't reappear in the poem perhaps suggests that there are some times in life in which only the individual themselves can find a way through. In other words, there won't always be a neighbor around to help light the way, and we must all sometimes face our inner darkness alone.
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The Road
Symbolically, this poem's "Road" can be read as life itself. On the one hand, this could be just a road—the direction that someone has to walk in order to make their way home through the darkness. On the other, it's the journey that all of us must make through life.
People often use metaphors of space, direction, and journeying to describe life—think about what it means if someone says, "I don't know where my life is going." This poem's "road" is one that's obscured in darkness (and full of trees waiting to whack passersby in the forehead), and suggests that life is inherently a difficult journey—but one that the "Bravest" can transform with courage.
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The Moon and Stars
Within the poem's larger extended metaphor of light and darkness, the moon and stars symbolize guidance and clarity. Sometimes the sky is dark and cloudy, symbolizing the times in life when times get tough—periods of grief, personal doubt, depression, and so on. Without a "Moon" or a "Star" for guidance in this metaphorical night sky, people don't know how to find their way in life. But just as navigators on the seas use the moon and stars to chart a course to their destination, life sometimes has guiding lights to give it purpose and meaning. Friendship, love, ambition—all of these can help an individual "meet the Road" of life. Sometimes, though, life seems truly bleak and dark, and nothing provides a source of metaphorical light.
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“We grow accustomed to the Dark” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
"We grow accustomed to the Dark" uses alliteration sparingly. Generally speaking, though, patterns of sound like alliteration, consonance, and assonance help to bring a poem's world vividly to life on the page. Take the shared /n/ of "newness" and "night" in line 6. This alliteration pulls readers' attention to this image of sudden, unfamiliar darkness.
One strong example comes at the end of the poem (and is specifically an example of sibilant alliteration):
Either the Darkness alters —
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight —
And Life steps almost straight.These two separate pairs of words that start with an /s/ sound evoke how the poem's wanderers learn to find their way—to see straight in the dark. Those matched pairs are like one foot falling confidently in front of another, which relates to the way that bravery, according to the poem can help to meet life's challenges—to walk through life "almost straight."
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Assonance
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Caesura
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Consonance
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Enjambment
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Extended Metaphor
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“We grow accustomed to the Dark” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Accustomed
- Disclose
- Grope
- Alters
Accustomed-
Used to.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “We grow accustomed to the Dark”
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Form
The poem consists of five quatrains (four-line stanzas). Dickinson often uses quatrains; they're by far the most common stanza form in her poetry. The quatrains here are also known as ballad stanzas, because their alternating pattern of iambic tetrameter (lines 1 and 3 in each stanza) and iambic trimeter (lines 2 and 4) often turns up in old folk songs and hymns.
This regular stanza form gives the poem a sense of direction and purpose—which the poem's tale of being lost in life's woods undercuts! In other words, there's a tension between the poem's neat form and the untidy way in which life, according to the poem, usually unfolds.
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Meter
The poem uses ballad meter throughout, giving it a rhythmic sound that is typical of Dickinson's poetry. Ballad meter uses quatrains with an alternating pattern of iambic tetrameter (the first and third lines of each stanza) and trimeter (the second and fourth).
An iamb is a poetic foot with an unstressed-stressed beat pattern; tetrameter means there are four of these iambs in a line, whereas trimeter means there are three. The first stanza offers a perfect example of the meter at work:
We grow | accus- | tomed to | the Dark —
When Light | is put | away —
As when | the Neigh- | bor holds | the Lamp
To wit- | ness her | Goodbye —The poem's meter creates a sense of forward motion and propulsion, tying in with the discussion of "meet[ing] the Road" of life itself. The poem implicitly praises those who are willing to travel through the "Darkness" of life, rather than shy away from it. The dependable meter supports this argument, pushing the reader onwards.
That said, the poem also creates tension by disrupting the steady onward step of its iambic meter. The poem talks about the need to adjust to the darkness, and how the dark contains obstacles (like the comical "Tree" in line 14). This is achieved less by metrical variation and more by the use of em dashes, both at the ends of lines and as caesurae. This give the poem a slight tentativeness, as though it too is afraid of taking the next step (but does so nonetheless).
Finally, the poem saves its most noticeable metrical variation for the final stanza. It's no coincidence that this is when "the Darkness alters"—the meter also alters support this image:
Either | the Dark- | ness alters —
Or some- | thing in | the sight
Adjusts | itself | to Midnight —
And Life | steps al- | most straight.Both the first and third lines of this stanza (lines 17 and 19 overall) are "alter[ed]" or "adjust[ed]," each of them missing their usual final stress. The meter subtly echoes the way in which people become "accustomed to the Dark," how simply looking at something in the dark can bring it into better view. The poem returns to the "straight" and purposeful sound of its meter in the last line, signaling its approval of the "bravest"—those people who push on through the darkness that life throws at them.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem uses quatrains whose rhyme scheme runs like this:
ABCB
This common pattern, sometimes called the "ballad stanza," turns up in a lot of Dickinson's poetry. In other poems, these rhymes create a sense of forward motion and expectation as readers wait for that second B rhyme to appear. But this poem mostly uses slant rhyme—so the scheme isn't actually all that noticeable at first! Pairs like away/goodbye and brain/within are subtly linked by a shared sound, but not by a clear rhyme.
This makes the poem feel more tentative than an ABCB scheme normally might. This idea—that something is just a little off—fits in perfectly with the poem's literal and metaphorical darkness. The dark holds unexpected surprises and obstacles, just like life—and if the rhymes were bright and obvious, they wouldn't match the poem's tone.
With this in mind, it's worth looking more closely at the two points when the poem uses a true rhyme. In the fourth stanza, "tree" rhymes with "see," a clear rhyme that represents how the "bravest...learn to see" in the dark. In other words, a clear rhyme mimics clear sight.
In the last stanza, the first rhyme word—"sight"—rhymes perfectly with "Midnight" in the next line, cutting across the rhyme scheme. This rhyme is bright and clear, even if midnight isn't, reflecting how the "Bravest" learn to navigate the dark. The final slant rhyme—"sight" with "straight"—responds to the last line's image of life stepping "almost straight" by returning to the poem's usual wonky rhyming. Anything else would feel way too strong and suggest that "Darkness" can be entirely overcome or destroyed, when, in fact, it can only be embraced and "alter[ed]."
It's also worth nothing how "Tree" links up with "Directly" in line 14, which can be read as either assonance or internal rhyme. This is a clunky, sudden rhyme, as though the poem is tripping over itself—just like the "Bravest" people do as they "grope" though the metaphorical darkness of life and run smack into a tree.
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“We grow accustomed to the Dark” Speaker
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The poem doesn't give away anything specific about its speaker. The speaker in Dickinson's poem's is often read as Dickinson herself, and this poem's focus on psychological difficulty—long dark "Evenings of the Brain"—might emerge from Dickinson's sometimes-painful inner life. But the reader doesn't have to interpret things this way to understand and appreciate this poem.
Whoever this speaker is, it's clear they feel a quiet admiration for the "Bravest" people—those who are willing to tackle life's "larger [...] Darknesses" head on. Doing so, the speaker believes, makes the darkness lighter, or, at the very least, less scary. But perhaps not everyone can be so brave, the speaker calls "the Bravest" "they," suggesting that the speaker admires these courageous folks from afar.
The other important thing to note here is that the speaker mostly uses the first-person plural, and talks in general terms about what "we" experience throughout the poem. This implies that the poem describes a universal truth about life, one that "we" can all relate to. Facing metaphorical dark times, the poem suggests, is so common that everyone knows what it's like.
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“We grow accustomed to the Dark” Setting
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The poem is set on a dark road late at night—but that road might as much be a road in "the Brain" as a real one! The poem uses its dark, rocky road as a symbol of life itself.
Out on this symbolic road, the darkness of the night sky represents "those Evenings of the Brain" when life seems especially tough or uncertain. Sibilance in this section of the poem, built up by words like "Darknesses" and "disclose," conjures the hissing sound of a windy night, creating the impression that the reader is out in the cold (check out this guide's Devices section on consonance for more about this). Out here, there's always the chance of running directly into a concealed "Tree"—one of life's many unpleasant surprises.
This harsh, unforgiving setting allows the poem to offer praise for those people who are willing to take life on—to embrace darkness, rather than shy away from it. Life itself, then, becomes a kind of an obstacle-laden journey into the dark that is nonetheless worth undertaking.
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Literary and Historical Context of “We grow accustomed to the Dark”
Literary Context
Though a prolific writer, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) published only a handful of poems during her own lifetime—and "We grow accustomed to the Dark" wasn't one of them. It wasn't until after Dickinson's death that her sister Lavinia found and published her work. But this poem, written around 1862, didn't even appear in early collections: it was first printed in 1935!
While it's one of Dickinson's lesser-known poems, "We grow accustomed to the Dark" shares many traits with more famous works like "Because I could not stop for Death," "I'm Nobody! Who are you?," and "I heard a Fly buzz—when I died." Like those poems, this one expresses complex ideas in deceptively simple language. As is typical of Dickinson's poetry, the reader sense that there is much more going on than meets the eye.
Dickinson was such an original and unusual poet that her work arguably stands alone. Though she expressed admiration for poets like William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, their influence is not easy to detect directly in the poem. In fact, some critics see Dickinson as an ahead-of-her-time Modernist—and Modernist writers like Virginia Woolf indeed admired (and were influenced by) Dickinson's psychological brilliance and inward gaze.
Historical Context
This poem was written during the American Civil War, a time of great societal uncertainty and darkness. While Dickinson was famously reclusive and didn't get involved in the war directly, she was firmly on the Northern side of the conflict. Perhaps her shyness informs this poem's admiration of "the Bravest" people—those who are willing to face life head on and "meet the Road."
While Dickinson did very little actual travel, she arguably traveled further than anyone else in terms of poetic imagination. But her brilliance came alongside a great deal of suffering. The poem's focus on mental "Darknesses," which it describes as "Evenings of the Brain," can be considered in the context of Dickinson's own struggles with anxiety, depression, and possibly epilepsy—conditions that had yet to be explored as diseases in the 19th century.
It's also worth considering how much society's relationship with light and darkness has changed since the poem's composition. It wasn't until after Dickinson's death that street lighting became commonplace—meaning that setting out after sunset was much more likely to bring about an encounter with true darkness. The poem gestures towards humankind's long-lasting relationship with the night sky, referencing the way that the moon and stars can help with navigation.
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More “We grow accustomed to the Dark” Resources
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External Resources
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Dickinson's Darknesses — A theory about the poet's notorious reclusiveness.
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The Poem Out Loud — Check out an animation and reading of the poem.
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More Poems and Dickinson's Biography — A valuable resource from the Poetry Foundation.
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Dickinson's Process — An intriguing article about the more material side of Dickinson's writing.
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Dickinson's Letters — Fascinating excerpts from Dickinson's correspondence.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Dickinson
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