"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 banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

譯文：

我是無名之輩，你是誰?

你，也是，無名之輩?

這就有了我們一對!可是別聲張!

你知道，他們會大肆張揚!

做個，顯要人物，好不無聊!

像個青蛙，向仰慕你的泥沼——

在整個六月，把個人的姓名

聒噪——何等招搖!

Emily Dickinson

賞析：

The poem’s first stanza tells how the speaker meets a fellow "nobody" — a friend. Together, the two nobodies can enjoy each other’s company and their shared anonymity.

Anne Shirley, the heroine of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables book series, knows what it is like to be an outsider and to have a special friend. Her best friend and kindred spirit is Diana Barry.As a pair, they aren’t really nobodies anymore. That’s why the speaker says, "Don’t tell! / They ’d banish us, you know." She understands that once you have another "nobody" at your side, you aren’t really a "nobody" anymore. And she doesn’t want to be banished or kicked out from what she sees as a society of nobodies.

She’s comfortable there.

In the second stanza, the tone of the poem changes. The speaker sounds confident. Perhaps it is her discovery that there are other people like her — other "nobodies"-- that makes her feels strongly that being a "somebody" isn’t such a great idea.

She realizes that having a friend who understands you and accepts you as you are is more important than being admired by a lot of people or being in the "in" crowd.