Worldofwords18′s Weblog

I’m Nobody- Emily Dickinson

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!

I chose this poem because it is very true to how people can tend to feel. It also has 2 levels: a literal one and another, deeper level. On a literal level I think Dickinson is trying to say she is just her, she’s nobody, nothing special, nothing to be looked at. Then she finds someone else who thinks they are a “nobody” and decides that hey- maybe there is more than just me that is a nobody. She doesn’t think anyone should know because if people found out that there’s such privacy and secrecy, the pair of “nobodies” would be banished. Her feelings of intimacy and secrecy are reflected as beautiful and amazing in the next stanza when she states how boring and downing it can be to an actual “somebody” and that it is too public and looked at and judged.

On a deeper level I think Dickinson is trying to show how great it can be to be private and secret about certain aspects of one’s life and that flaunting everything you are and everything you’ve got isn’t always the best and at times- when you’re being judged or the attention isn’t on you- it can be depressing and dreary. It’s almost as if she is saying “yes, you think you are somebody worth listening to and looking at and that you are the brightest star in the sky, but look at you, you are just telling your name to an inatimate object over and over because you are too full of yourself.”

Yes it seems somewhat drab and depressing, but in the light that I look at it in, it has a way of saying that not everything need be public and that sometimes those that are more quiet and secretive are more respected and intriguing.