I Am Nobody, Who Are You?

My early love of the nearly invisible E.D.

From the Amherst College archives, “the only authenticated daguerrotype of Emily Dickinson received from Lavinia Dickinson (her little sister) sometime in the 1890’s.”

For the past three weeks I’ve been downed by the same flu that has hit many of us in the Northern hemisphere. This also means I’ve not written to you in awhile. And honestly, I’m not sure how many more influential 20th century (now 19th century) poets I have up my sleeve. But then the fact that I’ve been housebound since January 1st, seemed the perfect moment to spend with Emily Dickinson.

Linda Pastan liked to tell a story of a young woman who during the q. and a. following Pastan’s reading asked her, “Do you know Emily Dickinson?” There was the expected giggles from the audience and the girl turned a deep shade of red. In pitch perfect Pastan style she answered, “No. But I have been to her house and she’s visited me in my dreams.”

Before I could buy books, before I could really read, my sister Ruby bought me The Oxford Book of Poetry for Children with a crazed looking Merlin on the cover. No Emily Dickinson here, although I did fall in love with Lewis Carol and Walter de la Mare. I think I was introduced to Emily Dickinson by my superb third grade teacher, Miss Schiavo. She taught me to love poetry. It’s had a lasting effect. By ninth grade I was enrolled in a class exclusively on Emily Dickinson’s work—having been granted special permission to take the class as a Freshman—the only time I’ve jumped ahead in any genre, at any time.

Yet, I remember being disappointed by the course. My favorite Dickinson poem, “I’m Nobody, Who Are You?,” was not part of the curriculum. Still, my eight year old brain had committed it to memory and so I will offer it to you here.

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!

Perhaps one of the signs of a great poem is that you can love it when you’re eight and then fall in love with it again fifty-some years later: the same words. I know there are many incredible poems by Dickinson but the words that we bring into our bodies as children, the incantation and the exclamation (!) remains with us through the decades.

But what I really want to tell you about is: as an undergraduate student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, my bus stop was the one situated right after the Dickinson homestead. In good weather, I would often get off in front of her large mustard-colored estate, hoping that the rarefied air would drift my way.

In those days the house was used as a residence for some very lucky Amherst College professor. For a few months in the summer, it would be open to the public but that was it. I remember one Tuesday in July braving the front door and finding my way to Dickinson’s bedroom, her tiny white dress hanging off the edge of the door.

Afterwards, there was lemonade and a plate of ginger cookies served in the garden. I didn’t quite approve of the festive atmosphere. To me, Dickinson was all spirit.

I’ve feel shy about claiming her as “mine;” Emily Dickinson clearly belongs to all of us. However, it wasn’t until I moved to South Africa and a woman poet I met there told me how lucky I was to have had an early American female poet to look to—that I understood what a difference a little bit of representation can mean. A woman could grow-up to be a poet.

In the one image have of Dickinson, she is a teenager, not beautiful or especially noticeable at all. If you could be “nobody” and still be remembered more than one hundred years after your death, well, that was very good to know.

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her daguerreotype, named after its inventor, Louis Daguerre, used an early photographic process “employing a polished silver-plated sheet of copper.” It predated glass plates and took more patience, allowed less overall detail.

I wonder what Dickinson thought about as she posed for that photograph (taken around 1847). Gingerbread? Poetry? Love? She would have had to hold still awhile. No one knows who the photographer was. Very likely, it was taken in a local photographer’s studio or perhaps her father or brother had been an early adapter of the new technology. Maybe she was the photographer?

What would she make of our world of selfies, podcasts, and ticktocks? This world where so many prefer to put on a mask as a “somebody” rather than stay “nobody” writing letters and over 1800 poems in their own good time.