18 pages • 36 minutes read
I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” consists of eight lines, or two four-line stanzas known as quatrains. While the form is not entirely consistent, there is the presence of iambic trimeter, or a pattern of unstressed/stressed within three pairs of syllables, with two lines following iambic tetrameter, a pattern of unstressed/stressed within four pairs of syllables, throughout the poem. There are certain exceptions in which the syllabic pairs are trochaic, stressed/unstressed, rather than iambic. No consistent rhyme scheme is present in both quatrains, yet a description of the rhyme might be AABC in Stanza 1 and ABCB in Stanza 2, as end rhyme is used: “you” / “too” (Lines 1-2) and “frog” / “bog” (Lines 6, 8). Many of the line endings have an exclamation point, which in today’s email and text culture might seem overused. Here, the use makes clear the speaker’s feelings that she is passionate about the subject—both on what she wants to be and what she does not want to be.
Caesura/Dashes
Dickinson uses caesura, or a pause in the middle of a line, through the employment of dashes to show emphasis and even mild hesitation before particular words. For example, in Line 2, she uses dashes around the word “Nobody” (Line 2) as if tentatively asking the reader if they share her “nobody” status. In Line 6, she uses dashes again around “like a Frog” (Line 6) to make it clear to her readers what she means by public. Comparing it to a frog, she is able to visualize what the “somebody” experience is like from her point of view. If she were speaking extemporaneously rather than writing this poem, she might naturally pause at this point in the conversation in order to think of the right simile to help her readers understand her meaning. Curiously, in Line 5, she uses the dashes around “to be” before ending on the word “Somebody” (Line 5). The words “to be” seem relatively minor, but she exalts these two little words with the use of dashes and pausing, suggesting the importance of being. Shakespeare’s famous Hamlet monologue starts “To be,” and one the most common questions adults ask young people is what they want to be when they grow up.
Irony
The unexpected nature of the first line establishes a prideful tone, or at the very least it establishes acknowledgment, which is not common to “nobodies.” Many nobodies feel shame, as stereotypically depicted in so many television shows and movies about “ugly ducklings” turning into swans and “nerds” desperate to be in popular cliques. In the second line, the speaker does not just ask who the reader or other person is openly but narrows in on their nobody status, not the typical way to make an acquaintance. By Line 3, the reader joins the speaker’s nobody status, and the speaker now has a friend, which is often the goal of a somebody. The definition of nobody includes no one or no person. Dickinson redefines the term in the first line to one person by declaring, “I’m Nobody!” (Line 1), and then goes even further in the third line to include “a pair” (Line 3). By the fourth line, she wants to end any additional increases in nobodies as that would start to move into somebody territory for her; she writes, “Don’t tell!” (Line 4). Throughout these atypical shifts in tone and meaning, a sense of humor emerges in the writing that makes the reader question how they should react.
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By Emily Dickinson
