Summary
The 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
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.
Commentary
Ironically, 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