My Featured Poem

I’m Nobody! Who Are You?
by Emily Dickinson

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 day

To an admiring bog!



Audio Version
From the website, Pearls of Wisdom

I. About the Poem 

The poem was first published in 1891 in Poems, Series 2, a collection of Dickinson's poems assembled and edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. It is composed of two quatrains and with an exception of the first line, the rhythm alternates between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, so it employs alliteration, anaphora, smile, satire, and internal rhyme but no regular end rhyme scheme. However, lines 1 and 2 and lines 6 and 8 end with masculine rhymes. The poet incorporates the pronouns you, we, us, your into the poem, and in doing so, draws the reader into the piece. It suggests anonymity is preferable to fame.

Works Cited （参考文献）

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_Nobody!_Who_are_you%3F

II. About the Author

In 1830, Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but only for one year. Throughout her life, she seldom left her house and visitors were few. The people with whom she did come in contact, however, had an enormous impact on her poetry. She was particularly stirred by the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she met on a trip to Philadelphia. He left for the West Coast shortly after a visit to her home in 1860, and some critics believe his departure gave rise to the heartsick flow of verse from Dickinson in the years that followed. While it is certain that he was an important figure in her life, it is not certain that this was in the capacity of romantic love—she called him "my closest earthly friend." Other possibilities for the unrequited love in Dickinson’s poems include Otis P. Lord, a Massachusetts Supreme Court Judge, and Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican.

By the 1860s, Dickinson lived in almost total physical isolation from the outside world, but actively maintained many correspondences and read widely. She spent a great deal of this time with her family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was actively involved in state and national politics, serving in Congress for one term. Her brother Austin attended law school and became an attorney, and lived next door with his wife Susan Gilbert. Dickinson’s younger sister Lavinia also lived at home for her entire life in similar isolation. Lavinia and Austin were not only family, but intellectual companions during Dickinson’s lifetime.

Dickinson's poetry reflects her loneliness and the speakers of her poems generally live in a state of want. Her poems are also marked by the intimate recollection of inspirational moments which are decidedly life-giving and suggest the possibility of happiness. Her work was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity.

She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as John Keats. Though she was dissuaded from reading the verse of her contemporary Walt Whitman by rumor of its disgracefulness, the two poets are now connected by the distinguished place they hold as the founders of a uniquely American poetic voice. While Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955. She died in Amherst in 1886.

Upon her death, Dickinson's family discovered 40 handbound volumes of nearly 1800 of her poems, or "fascicles" as they are sometimes called. These booklets were made by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems in an order that many critics believe to be more than chronological. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of various sizes and directions (some are even vertical). The poems were initially unbound and published according to the aesthetics of her many early editors, removing her unusual and varied dashes and replacing them with traditional punctuation. The current standard version replaces her dashes with a standard "n-dash," which is a closer typographical approximation of her writing. Furthermore, the original order of the works was not restored until 1981, when Ralph W. Franklin used the physical evidence of the paper itself to restore her order, relying on smudge marks, needle punctures and other clues to reassemble the packets. Since then, many critics have argued for thematic unity in these small collections, believing the ordering of the poems to be more than chronological or convenient. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1981) remains the only volume that keeps the order intact.

Works Cited （参考文献）

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/155#sthash.ihanBD0D.dpuf

IV. My Reaction

A. Reaction Point - rhyme（韻、言葉の端部で音の繰り返し）

• Rhyme means the repetition of sounds at the ends of words.
• For example: "you" and "too" or "frog" and "bog".
• Lines 1 and 2 and lines 6 and 8 end with masculine rhymes. In this poem, I think that there is no regularity in each of lines end.

B. Reaction Point - alliteration（頭韻の繰り返す） 

• Alliteration means repetition of initial consonant sounds.
• For example: "I" and "Are" of lines 1 and 2, "Then" and "They"  of lines 3 and 4, "How" of lines 5 and 6 and "To" of lines 7 and 8.
• It understands that the beginning of a sentence becomes the same word and rhyme when I watch this poetry by each two lines.I felt that this poem's rhythm is good by repeating initial consomant sounds and easy to read.

C. Reaction Point - metaphor（異なる種類の別のもので、一つのことを直接比較する、比喩）

• Metaphor means the direct comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind.
• For example: How public, like a frog
• The second stanza differences the first stanza's meaning. In short, lines 1 and lines 5 compare between "somebody" and " frog". So I think that Emily Dickinson may be compare specific someone to a frog and wants to tell that somebody can be a frog.

D. My General Opinion
    When I read this poetry for the first time, I thought this poem to sing the cry of the heart of the author. However, as I read it many time, I felt whether this poetry was singing about love. When I examined about Emily Dickinson, I found that she wrote a lot of poetry of the love. At the same time, I want to read other her poetry. I like "I'm Nobody！Who Are You？" now.