I'm Nobody!
Who are you?
Emily Dickinson
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!
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Fliss: Welcome, John; and well met to you and Emily Dickinson, who joins us this month through one of her famous poems. The first thing I’d like to mention, something you brought to my attention before this discussion, is that the poem has two versions! The difference lies in the last line of the first stanza. So above, the Variorum edition, has ’Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!’, whereas the other version, the poem published in 1891, has ’Don’t tell! they’d banish us – you know!’ Is there a case to be made for either one to have been more likely the original line, or is it impossible to know for sure?
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John: Well met, Fliss. And you are most welcome! I believe the 1891 edition was edited with the sort of freedom common in that century, and of course (being posthumous) without Emily‘s input. As I understand it, the Variorum edition is faithful to her manuscripts – people like it. Emily was out of the common run and her first editors compromised that.
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F: How interesting, John. Well, I‘m glad we have the Variorum version to consider here! In between work tasks recently, I managed to do a little reading about Emily, and it seems editing happened quite a lot during her lifetime as well as after her death. Occasionally I come across poetry in my job as a copy editor and I rarely make any changes; if any are necessary, I draw the poet’s attention to them rather than just going ahead. But the attitude must have been very different in Emily‘s day! Was it almost part of the culture of poetry publishing in those times?
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J: Yes, the Variorum version seems the way to go. As the title suggests, it will indicate places where Emily edited her poems herself, showing any variants there are. She published almost none of her thousands of poems during her lifetime, as I recall – under ten, I think. I don‘t know much about how they were edited, but the nineteenth century did a lot of emendation, for instance in Classical texts, and that was considered quite normal. These days, emendation is much rarer. An example would be the variant we saw in 1891: ‘banish us‘ for ‘advertise‘! Quite a different concept.
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F: Very different indeed. In terms of editing during Emily‘s lifetime, I wonder whether this contributed in any way to her feeling of being nobody, if of course we assume that she is speaking here as herself rather than adopting a persona. I think I‘d find it rather dispiriting if any editor felt the need to alter my poetry to the extent to which hers was subjected. And I suppose that, for some, rejection might have this effect too. She was also published anonymously, which seems significant. The poem certainly comes out in favour of anonymity, but is it possible she might have felt less of a nobody if her voice had been unaltered, her identity unchanged?
J: That seems to me an interesting argument! I do think she would have been somewhat dismayed to see ‘advertise‘ become ‘banish us‘, thus radically changing her sense. It is possible that she encountered male editors and poets in her sister‘s house whose views made it clear to her that publishing would involve compromise if not amputation of her art, and so she decided to put everything in a drawer. It is an otherwise odd decision, though I imagine that the biographies often speculate as to why she did it. I know I do think of the narrowing path involved in speaking to an audience, and Emily‘s chat with her possible soulmate in the Nobody poem suggests a world in which such compromises are bypassed, though forever looming over her privileged dialogic voice: ‘they‘d advertise‘, as she writes. It seems to me you may have gone to the pith of the poem.
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F: Well, hooray for the pith! It‘s always good to arrive there, especially as I do find this poem appealing. There‘s certainly a feeling of freedom involved in opting out in terms of that advertising, becoming known, which is perhaps synonymous with today‘s emphasis on social media and other marketing tools. Undoubtedly some poets achieve a lot of marketability. But when what‘s required to make a poet marketable is simply too far from who they are, and they‘d rather stay true to themselves than play at being somebody else, being nobody is preferable, I think, especially when nobody has company, so to speak. And there is a lot of speculation about Emily‘s motivations, it‘s true. Another factor in preferring to opt out that I‘ve read about lately, is the possibility that she was autistic. Do you think this condition might have played a part too?
J: I like your comment ‘when nobody has company‘, which seems very à propos. As to the autism spectrum, it seems to me quite possible that Emily was indeed situated somewhere along it. Before turning to this poem specifically, we chatted a bit about how she became a recluse, who would lower gingerbread from her bedroom window to the children of Amherst. I‘ve visited her house and she wrote at a tiny desk, which may explain her short poems. She had photos on the walls of famous Victorian women writers: George Eliot, as I recall, and maybe Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Her social life was conducted on her own terms.
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F: Yes, from what I‘ve read she certainly seems to have been an independent spirit, the type that would resist any sort of shrink-to-fit approach. I love the details of the photos, the tiny desk, the lowered gingerbread. The word ‘iconic‘ is used rather frequently nowadays, but in Emily‘s case I think it applies. There‘s some to-ing and fro-ing about autism in the literature, though that has much to do with how the condition itself is understood. And the company of a nobody is undoubtedly something special, bringing to mind a true and lasting friendship. Another aspect of Emily‘s life that interests me, and that I think might be more significant than some suppose, is her experience of Bright‘s disease. This was diagnosed late in life, but there are suggestions that the symptoms of it developed earlier. These included epilepsy, and I wonder whether that, too, might have had something to do with her reclusive nature. Do you have any thoughts on this, John?
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J: Only that you have argued rather well, I thought, for the possibility that a person subject to epileptic seizures might be uncomfortable in the public arena, and that this might certainly apply to an unmarried woman in the Victorian era. Her retreat indoors, which parallels her decision not to publish or even advertise her work, was certainly her own choice, but it may have been shaped by factors over which she had little say, from autism to Bright‘s disease.
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F: Yes, I think there was a lot involved in Emily's nobody-ness, let‘s say. A patchwork, really, of factors to do with her physical and psychological statuses. And still the thought that there‘s so much more to explore, while rather respecting the mystery of it, of the private self. But we can take a look at the meter now, perhaps, and note a few things about the poetic technique as well. Anything to add here?
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J: Well, let‘s see. The meter after line one is a combination of iambic tetrameter and trimeter. Alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter, known as common meter, is common in the ballad tradition. There are also two masculine rhymes, the second more surprising than the first. The poem is full of music, though, using assonance, for instance, and some internal rhyme too.
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F: Thanks, John! You know, there‘s probably scope for a separate discussion about Emily‘s poetic techniques overall; I think, for me, it has been particularly interesting to talk through what the poem seems to indicate about the poet she was, and how the person she was plays into that. There‘s probably a lot more to uncover too!
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J: Undoubtedly! Perhaps we could return to that, as well.
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F: Hooray!​
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A full biography of Emily Dickinson is available at the Poetry Foundation, here.
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