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 1,800 poems,
she published fewer than ten of them. This poem is her most famous
and most playful defense of the kind of spiritual privacy she favored,
implying that to be a Nobody is a luxury incomprehensible to the
dreary Somebodies—for they are too busy keeping their names in circulation,
croaking like frogs in a swamp in the summertime. This poem is an
outstanding early example of Dickinson’s often jaunty approach to
meter (she uses her trademark dashes quite forcefully to interrupt
lines and interfere with the flow of her poem, as in “How dreary—
to be—Somebody!”). Further, the poem vividly illustrates her surprising
way with language. The juxtaposition in the line “How public—like
a Frog—” shocks the first-time reader, combining elements not typically
considered together, and, thus, more powerfully conveying its meaning
(frogs are “public” like public figures—or Somebodies—because they
are constantly “telling their name”— croaking—to the swamp, reminding
all the other frogs of their identities).
