I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

“I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” is an eight-line poem divided into two quatrains, or four-line stanzas. Dickinson identifies herself in the first line as a “Nobody” with a capital “N” and an authorial “I” (Line 1), connecting her personal experiences and thoughts to Pronouns and their importance in this poem. She juxtaposes her nobody status by rhetorically asking, presumably the reader, who they are. This first line has ironic qualities in that the abrupt announcement of being something that is normally negative is exaggerated into a positive. This exaggeration in turn leads to comedic effect and also an unexpected tone of pride. Most “nobodies” do not announce or even know other people to announce their status. In the second line, the speaker narrows her question even further by asking anyone, the reader specifically, if they are also a nobody. She uses dashes around the word “Nobody” to pause and provide emphasis on the word, using a poetic device known as caesura. In the third line, Dickinson assumes the answer from the prior question is a yes and announces that “there’s a pair of us” (Line 3), with the ending punctuation mark an exclamation point, seemingly expressing enthusiasm. The paradoxical nature of nobodies being a pair highlights The Universal Desire to Express and Be Heard, including the speaker’s contradictory feelings about wanting anonymity but not wanting to be entirely alone. In Line 4, Dickinson goes further with the confidante pairing and asks them to not tell anyone else, as that would bring too many people into the mix and make her a somebody, which she describes as undesirable in the second stanza.

In Line 5, the start of the second stanza, the tone shifts, and Dickinson talks about how terrible it is “to be – Somebody” (Line 5). Like enthusiastically announcing she is a nobody, her describing being somebody as “dreary” is unexpected (Line 5). Using the dash again, she pauses for effect before somebody and also capitalizes the word, putting both statuses of nobody and somebody on similar footing. In addition, the word “dreary” in Line 5 seems to foreshadow, or predict, the setting of the simile that is about to follow. In Line 6, she uses a simile to compare being a somebody to “a Frog” (Line 6). This comparison is more of an aural rather than a visual one, as she goes on in Line 7 to mention that the frog tells its name all during the month of June. (Frogs here are associated with loud croaking noises.) In the eighth and final line, she mentions the bog, which is both a rhyme for frog and where it lives. The bog is associated with a swampy area, especially in the summer months, that most humans would not find appealing enough to call home. She describes this bog as “admiring” (Line 8), which is the most positive word in this stanza, but, at the same time, a bog is a space where frogs croak all the time, so who is really listening becomes the question. It could be that the frog is only listening to itself and/or the accumulation of noises from the myriad other surrounding frogs.