"I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us- don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!"
This is one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems. The poem includes iambic trimester and sometimes uses a fourth stress. She also uses an ABCB rhyme scheme throughout the poem. In the first line she exclaims that she in nobody and is curious who you are. She asks the reader if you are nobody to. Then excitedly announces there are a pair of you and begs you not to tell. This poem is explaining that Emily Dickinson did not want to be famous. She was perfectly happy being loved deeply than widely. In the next line she says that they would be banished if anyone found out. Most people crave to be someone and have everyone know who they are, to be important. So people would find it strange that she did not feel this way. It would be dreary to be somebody because caring about what people thought of you all the time would be dull and exhausting. You would never have any fun or do what you want to do. Frogs are public because they are very loud. She makes the comparison because if people want others to know who they are they are going to be very public and loud about themselves. To an admiring bog means they will talk about themselves to any person who is willing to listen. This was, and still is for that matter, how a lot of people feel and what a lot of people want. People want to be remembered. Through the entire poem Emily has a sort of one sided dialect with the reader. This makes you wonder if it was written to an anonymous reader, or to a specific person. Did she have this conversation with someone and them not agree? Did they pretend to agree and would she later find out she was being mocked? Or did they agree? We can only guess the answers to these questions, but asking them can help us to understand why she would write the poem and what was going through her head as she wrote it.
