I’m Nobody! Who are you?

By Emily DickinsonPresenter: Bih JieFrom Life Science

A Brief Instruction of AuthorShe was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. After she studied at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she spent a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family‘s house in Amherst. Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence.

From Wikipedia.org

From the daguerreotype taken at Mount Holyoke, December 1846 or early 1847. The only authenticated

portrait of Emily Dickinson later than childhood, the original is held by the Archives and Special Collections at

Amherst College.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson(December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)

Although Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson‘s poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends. Although most of her acquaintances were probably aware of Dickinson's writing, it was not until after her death in

1886—when Lavinia, Emily's younger sister, discovered her cache of poems—that the Breadth of Dickinson's work became apparent. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, both of whom heavily edited the content. A complete and mostly unaltered collection of her poetry became available for the first time in 1955 when The Poems of Emily Dickinson was published by scholar Thomas H. Johnson. Despite unfavorable reviews and skepticism of her literary prowess during the late 19th and early 20th century, critics now consider Dickinson to be a major American poet.

I’m Nobody! Who are you?I’m nobody! Who are you?Are you-Nobody-too?Then there’s a pair of us!Don’t tell! They’d advertise-you know!

How dreary-to be-somebody!How public-like a FrogTo tell your name-the live long June.-To an admiring Bog!

By Emily Dickinson

SummaryThe speaker exclaims that she is “Nobody,” and asks, “Who are you? / Are you— Nobody—too?” If so, she says, then they are a pair of nobodies, and she admonishes her addressee not to tell, for “they’d banish us—you know!” She says that it would be “dreary” to be “Somebody”—it would be “public” and require that, “like a Frog,” one tell one’s name “the livelong June— / To an admiring Bog!”

Form Ⅰ

The two stanzas of “I’m Nobody!” are highly typical for Dickinson, constituted of loose iambic trimeter occasionally including a fourth stress (“To tell your name—the livelong June—”). They follow an ABCB rhyme scheme (though in the first stanza, “you” and “too” rhyme, and “know” is only a half-rhyme, so the scheme could appear to be AABC), and she frequently uses rhythmic dashes to interrupt the flow.

Form ⅡI’m nobody! Who are you?Are you-Nobody-too?Then there’s a pair of us!Don’t tell! They’d advertise-you know!

How dreary-to be-somebody!How public-like a FrogTo tell your name-the live long June.-To an admiring Bog!

←Simile.

←Symbol.

Commentary ⅠIronically, one of the most famous details of Dickinson lore today is that she was utterly un-famous during her lifetime—she lived a relatively reclusive life in Amherst, Massachusetts, and though she wrote nearly 1,800 poems, she published fewer than ten of them. This poem is her most famous and most playful defense of the kind of spiritual privacy she favored, implying that to be a Nobody is a luxury incomprehensible to the dreary Somebodies—for they are too busy keeping their names in circulation, croaking like frogs in a swamp in the summertime. This poem is an outstanding early example of Dickinson’s often jaunty approach to meter (she uses her trademark dashes quite forcefully to interrupt lines and interfere with the flow of her poem, as in “How dreary— to be—Somebody!”).

Commentary ⅡFurther, the poem vividly illustrates her surprising way with language. The juxtaposition in the line “How public—like a Frog—” shocks the first-time reader, combining elements not typically considered together, and, thus, more powerfully conveying its meaning (frogs are “public” like public figures—or Somebodies—because they are constantly “telling their name”— croaking—to the swamp, reminding all the other frogs of their identities).