Nobody is comforted for long in Irene's "In the Dark." The poem opens with the furniture of a children's bedtime story (shadows, nightmares, a closet) and then takes the comfort away: "The monsters never stay in the closet." The childhood belief that fear can be shut behind a door is gone, and the monsters have moved into the speaker's head. What begins as a poem about night terrors ends as an accusation aimed at someone who, judging by the final stanzas, should have protected the speaker and did not.
The first stanza borrows the sound of a nursery rhyme. Its couplets (asleep/creep, end/then) are tidy and chantlike, and the "you" it addresses is given advice: learn to live, don't fall for the lines fear gives. That tidiness is also a trap, because one line refuses to behave. "Life can never be simple can it?" is indented, longer than its neighbours, and has no rhyme partner, as if the speaker's rhythm gave out mid-thought. The poem never says who this "you" is. Since "I hope you make it 'til then" sounds like encouragement offered across a gap, it may be the speaker comforting a more frightened self, though that is an inference.
In the second stanza the poem moves into the first person, and the rhythm turns sinister. "When the lights go out, / The monsters shout, / With glee inside my head" has a skipping, almost cheerful beat, which makes the monsters' glee audible. Then the line stretches: "To make me think, to make me cry, that I would rather be dead." The repeated "to make me" piles up with no room to breathe, like a thought that will not stop. The defiance that follows moves from "cannot win" to "will not win", from a statement of fact to a vow, and then drops into plain speech: "I don't want to be dead." The word "end" matters here too. In the first stanza the end is something hoped for ("One day, one day, this all will end"), but here the speaker refuses a particular ending: "That cannot be how this ends."
The third stanza is where control breaks down. Commands ("Make it stop, make this stop") and clipped, blunt rhymes (sleep/weep, voice/choice) carry the panic, and the body is dragged in: "I cannot eat, I dare not sleep." The speaker also says "I can't give these thoughts voice," which is a paradox, since the poem is itself that voice. The strongest moment is the handling of "shame." The speaker has heard others say "what a shame," a pity that makes them smaller, and answers by turning the word around: "It's not a shame, I'm not a shame!" Shame then rhymes with "You never came!", so the label pinned on the speaker is set against the absence of the person who failed to show up. A small shift in tense adds to the effect: "Why was I alone? Why am I alone?" The past has not stayed in the past.
The final stanza contains only questions. "Where were you?" is repeated, and the blame is split in two: "Why couldn't you see? Why couldn't I tell?" One question faults the person who failed to notice, and the other faults the speaker's own silence. Then comes a contradiction: "I want to remember" sits against "I'm scared to remember." The shift to "us" ("protect us," "fall apart on us") suggests the speaker was not the only one affected. The last line, "Not to fall apart on us," hangs without a rhyme, and the poem stops with trust still unrepaired.
The poem is worth reading because it refuses the tidy ending the nursery-rhyme opening promised. It never names "him" or explains what happened, and that restraint is part of its power, because the pain lives in the questions rather than in any account of events. It rejects pity, it admits to wanting both to remember and to forget, and it breaks silence while saying silence is impossible. The only light is the hope in the first stanza, which the poem lets stand alongside its distrust without trying to resolve the two.