3. The poem ‘I’m Nobody!’ (J288)
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 banish us* -- you know!
How dreary -- to be -- Somebody!
How public -- like a Frog --
To tell your** name -- the livelong June --
To an admiring Bog!
*advertise
‘I’m Nobody’ is full of double meanings and contradictions. Thinking and writing about it gives me more puzzles instead of more clarity. The next part is an analysis of the poem. I present first my own and then the interpretation of other Dickinson scholars.
To figure out all the meanings the words in the poem can have, I used the Emily Dickinson Lexicon. This online dictionary gives meanings for almost ten thousand words Emily Dickinson used in her poetry. To find the meanings they looked, for example, in the poems of Dickinson herself, in contemporary dictionaries, in dictionaries from Dickinson’s time and in the Bible. The dictionary is a collaboration of a long list of authors. Cynthia L. Hallen is the chief editor.
To be Nobody or to be Somebody
The poem starts with an exclamation: “I’m Nobody!. Here is what the Emily Dickinson Lexicon says about the word ‘nobody’:
“nobody, pron. [see no, adj. + body, n.]
A. No one.
B. None other; not anybody else; not any others.
C. A cipher; a nonentity; a commoner; no one important; an unknown person; an ordinary person; not anyone famous; [fig.] a stranger; an alien; (see Charles Mackay's 1858 “Little Nobody” poem).
As you can see, this small and simple sentence already presents a lot of different meanings. It can mean that you are literally not there, that you have no body and are absent or it can mean that you are there, but not at all important. ‘Nobody’ is written with a capital ‘N’, like it is a name, an identity. So here there is already a contradiction: being nobody as identity. This is confirmed by the next two stanzas where ‘Nobody’ asks to another being if it is Nobody too because then they could be a pair, a team. It is better to find more beings like you than to stay alone.
The identity of being Nobody is a special one, worthy to be advertised when discovered. Being Nobody means that you can do what you want, because it doesn’t matter, because it is not like you are someone. And of course, when you are advertised you aren’t Nobody anymore. You can become Somebody. Also in the version where ‘banish us’ is used it makes being Nobody different and special. To be a Somebody presented as a very negative thing: it is ‘dreary’ to be Somebody.
“somebody (-'s), pron. [see some, adj. + body, n.]
A. Anyone; anybody; someone; at least one person.
B. Someone special; a specific person.”[3]
So here you can see Somebody can be special, but also common, like Nobody. It could be anybody. This contradiction is reinforced by the word ‘public’, which in the Lexicon can mean noticeable, visible and pretentious as well as common and accessible to all.[4] The ‘Frog’ here is the croaking sound the animal makes. It’s an onomatopoeia. The croaking of the frog has no meaning, it is useless babble. The frog goes on forever in June, the month with the longest days, so a long time to tell its name. In the Lexicon, June also stands for ‘renewal’[5], so a livelong June, in that case, would mean endless repetition. And the Bog that listens is just full of admiration without even paying attention to what really is said: nothing.
For me, the fun in this poem is the way how Dickinson plays with the contradiction between Nobody and Somebody. She turns their meanings upside down, by making the usually unimportant Nobody special and the Somebody that’s seen as an authority, an important figure, common repetitive and boring.
Scholars
So what do others say about this poem? There are various interpretations. For example, David Porter says that the poem is proof that Emily Dickinson didn’t want to be published.[6] Robert Weisbuch disagrees. He sees there is more to the poem. He says:
“The poem opens with a statement of introduction that both undermines itself and the self then seeks to confirm the new acquaintance, the reader within the poem, in this same un-identity. The problem with being Somebody, not just a well-known person but a consistent ego is stasis, mechanical repetition, (…): the unendingly same croakings of a frog to a bog full of admirers, whose admiration depends on the Somebody’s cowardly resistance to change.”[7]
Weisbuch sees that there is something challenging in the poem, some activism for being a free soul.
Then there is Domhnall Mitchell rejecting the activist view. He says in his chapter on Emily Dickinson and Class that the poem often is seen as anti-establishment, as empathising with the oppressed, but that it sympathises more with the anti-Irish politicians because the ‘bog’ was a bad way to speak about Ireland. The Irish are degraded to animals: frogs. He acknowledges that this poem doesn’t necessarily mean exactly this, but for him, it definitely isn’t a call for action. He sees it as Dickinson’s disapproval of all public utterance that defines a democracy.[8]
Also on the Prowling Bee blog, this poem is seen as a representation of Dickinson herself and that she was happy with her private life. An interesting thing Kornfeld points out is that Emily Dickinson was part of one of the most prominent families in the neighbourhood and therefore not at all a nobody.[9] Also Martin sees the poem as a proof that Emily Dickinson was repulsed by fame and wanted to be a ‘Nobody’.[10]
The Voice in I’m Nobody
We see that in all these interpretations, the goal of analysing the poem is to prove something about Dickinson’s opinions, so they see her as the speaker. It looks like this is the goal of analysing the poem. Here there is a clear difference in scholarly interpretation and dramatic interpretation. Because when speaking or singing a poem the goal is to communicate it is meaning to the audience and not to prove something about Emily Dickinson. For that reason, there is more freedom for personal fantasies. Still, it is very useful in knowing what the poet and person Emily Dickinson might have meant with the poem. She wrote it for a reason, whatever that may be, and to really move away from any connection to her would be ignoring the artist. Besides that, Emily Dickinson is far too interesting a person and artist to completely ignore. I do it the other way around from the scholars: I don’t use the poem to prove something about Emily Dickinson but use the information we have about her to make my own interpretation of the poem.
So who is speaking in the poem?. We know now that Dickinson liked to construct different discourses for different audiences, whether it is in her poems or in her letters. So in a way, she creates a new world within her writing. And here the line between Dickinson being herself and playing a role becomes very thin. If we look again at ‘I’m Nobody’, this is not how someone would really make conversation, so in that way, it is not real. With using role-playing when reciting this poem in spoken word or song, the dramatic interpretation can be more extreme and that will give the audience a more interesting and touching performance.
In the next section, I will discover the dramatic potential of ‘I’m Nobody’ by making my own voices for it. The poem really was the starting point and the interpretations described above helped to make the dramatic structure clearer.
[1] Emily Dickinson, The complete poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (New York, 1960) 133.
[2] Cynthia L. Hallen (ed.), “Emily Dickinson Lexicon, Definition for Nobody,” Brigham Young University (2018) http://edl.byu.edu/lexicon/term/555490 (accessed 10-2018).
[3] Cynthia L. Hallen (ed.), “Emily Dickinson Lexicon, Definition for Somebody (-’s),” Brigham Young University (2018) http://edl.byu.edu/lexicon/term/563411 (accessed 10-2018).
[4] Cynthia L. Hallen (ed.), “Emily Dickinson Lexicon, Definition for Public,” Brigham Young University (2018) http://edl.byu.edu/lexicon/term/432054 (accessed 10-2018).
[5] Cynthia L. Hallen (ed.), “Emily Dickinson Lexicon, Definition for June,” Brigham Young University (2018) http://edl.byu.edu/lexicon/term/570204 (accessed 10-2018).
[6] David T. Porter, The Art of Emily Dickinson’s Early Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1966), 162.
[7] Robert Weisbuch, “Nobody’s Business: Dickinson’s Dissolving Audience,” in Dickinson and Audience, eds. Martin Orzeck and Robert Weisbuch (Michigan, 1999), 75.
[8] Domhnall Mitchell, “Emily Dickinson and class,” in The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, ed. Wendy Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 197-200.
