[711] I'm Nobody! Who are you?

Guest poem sent in by Ashwin <ramasua@>

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!

	-- Emily Dickinson

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
  poem #92

[And yes, you can sing this one TTTO 'The Yellow Rose of Texas' :) - m.]

From: "Ted Johnson" <Jesustron@>

The poen is actually wrong, the last line in the second stanza is
"They'd Banish us, you know"

From: "D Brian" <dbrian@>

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

From: "D Brian" <dbrian@>

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

From: "marie antoinette" <texas_rose20@>

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

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From: TiGerLiLy682@

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