I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Emily Dickinson
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!
VOCABULARY
Dreary - boring and tiring
Public - the opposite of private, available for everyone to see
Livelong - entire, the whole length of something, an emphasis on boredom or a long
period of time passing
Bog - a swamp
STORY/SUMMARY
Stanza 1: I’m Nobody! No one knows my name or remembers me - who are you? Are
you Nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell anyone about us! They’d start
, advertising us - you know - and then we’d be somebody and people would know our
name, and we don’t want that!
Stanza 2: How boring and tiresome it must be to be - Somebody! How horrible it
would be to have your life and actions made public for the whole world to see - like a
Frog - to talk about yourself and your name the whole month of June - to people
who sit there and lap it up, like an admiring swamp!
A Frog in a Bog, photo by Elizabeth Spencer on Unsplash
SPEAKER/VOICE
Employing a humorous, ironic tone, Dickinson explores the positives and negatives of
fame in this poem. The sentiment is certainly that it would be boring, tiring and
inconvenient to achieve fame during one’s lifetime, because publicity would change
Emily Dickinson
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!
VOCABULARY
Dreary - boring and tiring
Public - the opposite of private, available for everyone to see
Livelong - entire, the whole length of something, an emphasis on boredom or a long
period of time passing
Bog - a swamp
STORY/SUMMARY
Stanza 1: I’m Nobody! No one knows my name or remembers me - who are you? Are
you Nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell anyone about us! They’d start
, advertising us - you know - and then we’d be somebody and people would know our
name, and we don’t want that!
Stanza 2: How boring and tiresome it must be to be - Somebody! How horrible it
would be to have your life and actions made public for the whole world to see - like a
Frog - to talk about yourself and your name the whole month of June - to people
who sit there and lap it up, like an admiring swamp!
A Frog in a Bog, photo by Elizabeth Spencer on Unsplash
SPEAKER/VOICE
Employing a humorous, ironic tone, Dickinson explores the positives and negatives of
fame in this poem. The sentiment is certainly that it would be boring, tiring and
inconvenient to achieve fame during one’s lifetime, because publicity would change
