Análise do poema de Emily Dickinson

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DEPARTAMENTO DE ESTUDOS DA LÍNGUA INGLESA, SUAS LITERATURAS E TRADUÇÕES – DELILT

Docente: Dolores Aronovich Aguero

Discente: Isaías Teixeira de Oliveira

Home Assignment – Poem Analysis

I’m Nobody! Who are you?, Emily Dickinson (1861)

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d banish us – 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’s poem ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’ celebrates anonymity, plain and simple. From the title, which is also the first line of them poem, the speaker claims to be ‘nobody’, someone unknown. The speaker already knows who he is. The poem goes on as a dialogue with the reader, who is, in a way, also unknown. We are the readers, we are the common people, and we are anonymous too. And the author identifies with us.

Still in the first stanza, the speaker warns us to keep quiet, so we can remain ‘nobody’, which is a valuable characteristic for Dickinson. “They’d banish us – you know!” this most likely refers to the world as a whole, the spectators, the fame. The author sees anonymity as an advantage, being in the public eye can be quite hard sometimes, and it seems nicer to be away from it. The contemporary singer Lady Gaga in the album The Fame Monster, which shows the dark side of being famous, portrayed something similar.

The second stanza boldly emphasizes that being ordinary and unknown is an advantage. It is ‘dreary’ to be somebody, meaning you have no privacy, you must always behave, and you are, in a way, controlled by the media, since you need to please the public eye and it can be very harsh if you don’t.

Dickinson compares ‘somebody’ to a ‘frog’, because it is always croaking and that draws a lot of attention to it. Attention that the speaker does not seek. Attention that can attract the wrong people.

Another interesting thing about this poem is how it is written and its structure. The author makes an unusual use of hyphens, they are used to emphasize the words and they can also represent pauses. Some important words, like ‘Frog’ and ‘Nobody’, are written with capital letter, which can be a trick to draw the reader’s attention to these key words.

The rhyme scheme does not follows a pattern: there is no ‘real’ rhyme in the first stanza, the closest we can get to a rhyme is ‘you’ and ‘too’. While in the second stanza, it is more noticeable with ‘Frog’ and ‘Bog’ (ABCB). Aside from that, we can see that there is assonance in the first stanza, we keep listening the ‘u’ sound in ‘Who’, ‘you’ (twice), ‘too’, which makes a nice and pleasant effect to the poems sound.

This poem accomplishes its objective, it makes a point in a beautiful well-written fashion, and it is memorable. It is truly one of my favorites and I see it as a masterpiece.