Emily Dickinson: I’m Nobody! Who are you?

[  # 76 of My Favourite Short Poems  ]

This is the third in a Monday sequence of poems, by three very different poets,but all of which have been composed as soul-searching expressions of the sense of self or the search for the same.

This is one of Emily Dickinson’s most quoted poems, short and to the point, in which she takes a more positive, if seemingly down-beat, stance on the subject.

Its memorable opening lines, grab the reader’s interest with their boldness and certainty.

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!

I think she is revelling in the fact that she is not well-known as a poet.  She, in fact, is enjoying her anonymity.  Apart from a very few, her poems were not published until after she died, and the freedom which this gave her from the publicity and pressures which fame can bring, she greatly valued.  So very different from the uncertainties and lack of self-esteem from which both John Clare and Sylvia Plath suffered.