I’M Nobody, Who Are You – Emily Dickinson

Im Nobody Who are you? This poem opens with a literally impossible declarationthat the speaker is Nobody. This nobody-ness, however, quickly comes to mean that she is outside of the familiar sphere perhaps, here Dickinson is touching on her own failure to fetch a published poet, and thus the fact that to most of society, she is Nobody. The speaker does non search bitter about thisinstead she asks the reader, playfully, Who are you? , and offers us a chance to be in cahoots with her (Are you Nobody Too? ). In the next line, she assumes that the answer to this question is yes, and so unites herself with the reader (Then on that points a pair of us ), and her use of exclamation points shows that she is genuinely happy to be a part of this failed couple. Dickinson then shows how oppressive the pack of somebodies can be, encouraging the reader to keep this a secret ( dont tell ) because otherwise theyd advertise, and the speaker and her reader would overleap their ability to stand apart from the crowd.It then becomes abundantly clear that it is non only preferable to be a Nobody, it is dreary to be a Somebody. These somebodies, these public figures who are so unlike Dickinson, are next compared to frogs, quite an pitifully, we can imagine, croaking away to the admiring Bog. These public figures do not even out attempt to say anything of importanceall they do is tell genius and only(a)s name, that is, their own name, over and over, in an attempt to make themselves seem important.This admiring Bog represents those people who allow the public figures to think they are important, the general masses who lift them up. These masses are not even granted the respect of having a sentient being to represent them. Instead, they are something into which one sinks, which takes all individuality away, and has no opinion to speak of, and certainly not one to be respected.