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I'm Nobody! Who are you? (260)
Emily Dickinson - 1830-1886

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!

Poetry used by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The
Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ralph W. Franklin ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard
College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. While she
was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was
not publicly recognized during her lifetime. She died in Amherst in 1886, and the first
volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890.

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More by Emily Dickinson
I measure every Grief I meet (561)
I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, eyes – 
I wonder if It weighs like Mine – 
Or has an Easier size.

I wonder if They bore it long – 

Or did it just begin – 
I could not tell the Date of Mine – 
It feels so old a pain – 

I wonder if it hurts to live – 

And if They have to try – 
And whether – could They choose between – 
It would not be – to die – 

I note that Some – gone patient long – 

At length, renew their smile – 
An imitation of a Light
That has so little Oil – 

I wonder if when Years have piled – 

Some Thousands – on the Harm – 
That hurt them early – such a lapse
Could give them any Balm – 

Or would they go on aching still

Through Centuries of Nerve – 
Enlightened to a larger Pain – 
In Contrast with the Love – 

The Grieved – are many – I am told – 

There is the various Cause – 
Death – is but one – and comes but once – 
And only nails the eyes – 

There's Grief of Want – and grief of Cold – 

A sort they call "Despair" – 
There's Banishment from native Eyes – 
In sight of Native Air – 

And though I may not guess the kind – 

Correctly – yet to me
A piercing Comfort it affords
In passing Calvary – 

To note the fashions – of the Cross – 

And how they're mostly worn – 
Still fascinated to presume
That Some – are like my own – 
Emily Dickinson
1951
The Savior must have been a docile Gentleman (1487)
The Savior must have been
A docile Gentleman—
To come so far so cold a Day
For little Fellowmen—

The Road to Bethlehem

Since He and I were Boys
Was leveled, but for that 'twould be
A rugged Billion Miles—
Emily Dickinson
1890
A Man may make a Remark (952)
A Man may make a Remark -
In itself - a quiet thing
That may furnish the Fuse unto a Spark
In dormant nature - lain -

Let us divide - with skill -

Let us discourse - with care -
Powder exists in Charcoal -
Before it exists in Fire -
Emily Dickinson
1890
Related Poems
I Am!
I am! yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest—that I loved the best—
Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest.
 I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
John Clare
1848
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