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!
Before I get into the poem itself, I just want to say a few words about Emily. It goes without saying that Emily’s poems are very short, for the most part easy to understand, and intricate in their own way. They’re intricate because she’s following the rules of poetry, but at the same time she isn’t. In a way, it’s like she’s redefining poetry–she had to have because she made a category for herself. They say Emily doesn’t put her emotions or thoughts into a poem but I think that’s a dangerous assumption. Just reading this poem and looking at it in front of you should be enough to tell her level of enthusiasm behind the speaker, as well as the structure of the poem itself.
The reason I chose this poem is because I had read this in a previous Poetry 101 class and I was given the assignment to configure my own poem imitating this one as a class exercise of mock poetry. Needless to say that no matter what I conjured up, it would never be anywhere near as good but I really enjoyed reading this poem and it stands to be one of my favorites to this day. To begin picking away at this poem, let me dabble a little about the speaker first. It’s clear that there is a dialogue but it’s a one-sided dialogue with the speaker asking a question and then answering it for themselves while presuming the listener to also be a “nobody”. Because there is no response from the listener, it’s safe to say that they are in agreeance with the speaker who feels content with the idea that there is someone like them. Much to my surprise, they are reluctant to share this news with the others. My first reaction to reading this poem made me believe that the speaker and the listener were two animals living in a bog, and how the speaker fathoms the idea of being public like a frog. I was also trying to understand how June fits into this picture of a swampy mire of a location and began to think about the conveying message throughout the poem. I mean again, this is Dickinson–her poetry is easy to understand but very rarely does a poet not layer their use of words to convey meaning in their poetry. Frog, June, bog, and somebody are the words most key to this interpretation.
What I like to think is that of all the life in a habitat, like a swamp, the frog would possibly have to be the loudest. In a swamp, you’d possibly find an alligator, birds, snakes, and various types of insects. Birds have a tendency to chirp about, while snakes and alligators hide in wait for their prey. Depending on the insect determines if they make any sound at all. So for me, frogs definitely have to be the one to make the most noise. If this is true, then all the attention would be shifted a frog from their croaking. The next thing to take into consideration is to ask why did Dickinson choose the month of June as reference for this image. She uses the word “livelong” to describe June. What we know about June is that it is one of the more longer months throughout the year and it’s in Summer. It possibly could have been in reference to Summer itself but the four seasons do not vary in length–they’re all about the same because not every month has thirty days in it. So maybe the frog’s attention would be long like the month of June. Then comes the setting itself; the bog. If we were to think about the bog as a society, the frog would be the center of attention–possibly a celebrity in this civilization.
Piecing all this together, I think this poem is about Emily Dickison herself. No one was just born famous. Everyone who is known came from something because of what they do. In a lot of ways, I believe this poem is about Emily not wanting the attention to boast about her accomplishments. She’d rather just be herself without the attention to continue doing what she loves doing.
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