I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too?

These are the opening lines of one of Emily Dickinson’s best-loved poems. The speaker greets a stranger as a fellow “nobody” and proposes a secret alliance: “Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell! / They’d banish us, you know.” The second stanza turns the tables on fame: “How dreary to be somebody!” Being somebody means croaking one’s own name all day long, like a frog, “To an admiring bog!”

Dickinson wrote the poem in the early 1860s in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she lived a famously private life; only a handful of her poems were printed while she lived, all without her name. After her death in 1886, a first collection of her poems appeared in 1890 and was a success, so a second series followed in 1891, opening its section “Life” with this poem. The editors of those volumes smoothed her dashes, capitals and some of her words; modern editions go back to her manuscripts.

The frog and its bog are still quoted whenever fame is mocked.

I'm nobody! Who are you?, first lines (Poems: Second Series), 1891

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work