I'm Nobody! Who are you?
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you--Nobody--Too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise--you know!
How dreary--to be--Somebody!
How public--like a Frog--
To tell one's name--the livelong June--
To an admiring Bog!
Commentary
I prefer not to subject this poem to a deep analysis - drawing elaborate analogies to life or our present day society and so on. The language is, IMHO, sufficiently plain and hard-hitting to convey Dickinson’s feelings. What catches my fancy is the whimsical punctuation and the only too evident sarcasm.
— Ashwin
Links
No shortage of Dickinson’s poems on Minstrels; there’s a biography at
[And yes, you can sing this one TTTO ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ :) - m.]
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Ted Johnson · 6 May 2002
The poen is actually wrong, the last line in the second stanza is “They’d Banish us, you know”
D Brian · 29 October 2002
Did she write two versions of the poem? (Then there’s a pair of them?) “Banish us” is the version I know, but the other version- also different for having “June” instead of “day” in the pentultimate line (and “your” for “one’s”) is numbered, and has the more convincingly Dickinsonian punctuation. I like the ‘banish” version better. I can’t find anyone who knows and compares both versions. The “advertise” version seems to have driven the other version out of her Collected Works; a supposedly complete Dickinson site lists only that version alphabetically.
D. Brian
Houston TX
D Brian · 15 December 2002
More light has been shed. According to R.W. Franklin, in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, (Belknap, 1998) the original manuscript of the poem has “advertise” underlined below “banish us”, as if the poet were suggesting it as a strong alternative. Thomas H. Johnson numbered the poem 288 in his 1955 definitive edition of Dickinson’s poems. For some reason, when he published his shorter collection of her poems in 1960, he included only the “advertise” version, with Dickinson’s characteristic dashes, and with other words (also underlined alternatives?) different from the previously published “banish” version. That version thereby came under copyright; the “banish” version with conventional punctuation (first published in 1891) is in the public domain. (I assume that Dickinson wrote the entire poem originally with her characteristic eccentric punctuation, but I have never seen a dashed version of the “banish” wording, and have no idea what copyright might obtain in such a case.) Obviously there is more research to be done. Thanks to distinguished Dickinsonian (and Texan) Tim Morris for his kind letter discussing this question, and to Maureen Homan for writing in response to my original comment and getting me interested in the question again. (Her 6th-grade daughter was aghast to find her beloved poem so altered.)
Doug B., Houston
Marie Antoinette · 22 July 2003
yes i believe the “banish” version is better as it is more effective in its meaning. “advertising” seems a bit bland for something so richly wry as dickinsins’ work.
elizabeth
TiGerLiLy682 · 23 September 2004
In response to Ashwin’s comment;
”[…]What catches my fancy is the whimsical punctuation[…]”
I did an “author study” on Emily Dickinson my junior year of high school, meaning I read about a third of her poems (she has 1775 total, if I remember correctly) and did insane amounts of research on her, and her punctuation is recurrent throughout her poems. She used dashes much like one uses commas, capitalization for emphasis and exclamations very liberally.
As a side note, the first few publications of her poetry (in a complete set, after her death), much of her “whimsical punctuation” was edited, thus taking away from the effect immensely.
xoxo Abby
Peggy Crone · 18 September 2006
this poem is totally wrong