The poem may be summarized very simply as being about how it is quite nice to be a Nobody rather than a Somebody – that anonymity is preferable to fame or public recognition. Nobodies can stick together and revel in their anonymity, but it’s more difficult to find companionship and an equal when you’re in the public eye. As the old line has it, it’s lonely at the top. Rather than buy the other old line – that fame and distinction are unequivocally desirable – Dickinson sees anonymity as an advantage. The poet proudly declares her ordinariness, her likeness to everyone else rather than her uniqueness. As with all Emily Dickinson poems, though, it is not so much what the poem says as how it says it that makes the poem distinct, memorable, and …show more content…
Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
The rhyme of ‘too’ and ‘know’ is only half-rhyme: ‘too’ looks back to ‘you’ (‘Who are you?’) more than it looks forward to ‘know’ (‘know’ itself picks up on the ‘No’ of ‘Nobody’). The use of the longer word ‘advertise’ among shorter simpler words draws our attention to that word, and this is deliberate. Nobody draws attention to Nobodies; but to do so would be to attempt to make them conspicuous, to advertise them, and the word advertise (easily the longest word in the stanza) is itself conspicuous in the poem. The rhyme scheme in the second stanza is more conventional (Frog/Bog), but the imagery is enigmatic. Why is a ‘Somebody’ like a frog? Because it croaks its (self-)importance constantly, to remind its surroundings that it is – indeed – Somebody? Or because there is something slimy and distasteful about people who possess smug self-importance because they are ‘Somebodies’. Indeed, the clue lies in that opening line, which, if it is read as a response to a question (absent from the poem), makes more