English Emily Dickinson Presentation
Juliëtte:
I am Nobody! Who are you? Poem 6
(My part)
In the first line of the second stanza, Emily tells us that she doesn’t want to be Somebody, she prefers to be left alone.
In the second line, she compares a person, Somebody, to a Frog. Frogs live out in the open, which is very public. Also, a frog can be quite loud, reminding everyone around of their presence, just like a Somebody. In addition, frogs can be slimy and distasteful, this could be the speakers opinion on people who are searching for attention all the time, which Emily calls, a Somebody.
In the third and the fourth line you can see that Emily speaks of a Bog. A bog is a place where a frog might live. However, in a bog there usually aren’t a lot of people around. So, no matter how loud the Frog will be, no one will care. So, when you tell one’s name, no one will listen. ‘The livelong June’ refers to the beginning of the summer, because then the frogs start to appear.
This is why the speaker doesn’t want to be Somebody, no one would be there to care or listen to what she has to say, and she will feel foolish like a frog.
Milou:
The poem “I Am Nobody! Who are you? was written by Emily Dickinson and I am going to explain the first stanza of the poem. The poem begins with an introduction of the speaker. The speaker calls themselves a nobody. She says in the first line: “I’m Nobody!. Then the speaker asks who the reader is and this happens also in the first line: “Who are you?” In the second line she asks if the reader is a nobody too. The speaker assumes that the reader is a nobody too and says: “Then there’s a pair of us!” They are now together nobody. The speaker says that the other nobody cannot tell anyone, because they would advertise. They don’t want that other people see that they are a nobody, because then everyone would like to be a nobody too and the speaker does not want everyone to be a nobody. That is why the last line says: ‘Don’t tell! They’d advertise – you know! The speaker thinks that the reader already knows this, because of the ‘you know!’.
Timo (myself)
Tone:
The Tone of this poem can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. The tone of the poem is a bit ironical. The poem is ironical, because in the first stanza she pokes fun of the readers of the poem. She indirectly mentions that the audience is in fact no one. Especially the first line are I’m nobody, who are you? With this line she says that she is nobody and also states that the audience is nobody. It has an undertone of loneliness, in the she mentions that herself that she is nobody.
Why is this poem from Emily Dickinson?
You can see that this poem is from Emily Dickinson, because you see multiple dashes throughout the poem, why she used in almost all of her poems. She also uses capital letters to emphasis certain words, this capital letter are not in the start of a sentence or a name. Here name is not on this poem, but this was the case with almost all of her poems.
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