Emily Dickinson
I’m nobody, who are you?
I’m nobody, who are you?
Are you nobody too?
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!
NOTE:
This is probably one of Emily Dickinson’s most famous poems. Knowing how tiny her life was you would think she wouldn’t have any “famous poems.” Emily’s style was what made her famous. She was a good observer. She wrote about tiny things you wouldn’t ordinarily notice. She had an interesting point of view. Her devices were similes and metaphors. She tended to favor them a little bit more. In this poem, she used similes. Like ” How public like a frog.” What I like about this poem is pretty much the idea. The idea of this poem sounds like a poem to cheer you up when you feel all alone so that you could know someone else is there in the same situation as you to defeat that loneliness. I observed she almost always in her poems uses “I.” instead of “he,she, or it .” My opinion of Emily’s poems is that they are very soothing. What we can all remember about her poetry is her “tiny” style.
I died for beauty, but was scarce. A poem by Emily Dickinson.
I di
ed for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
“For beauty,” I replied.
“And I for truth,–the two are one;
We brethren are,” he said.
And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms.
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
-Emily Dickinson
Because I could not stop for Death
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
Since then ’tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.
NOTE:
Emily Dickinson left several versions of this poem.
This is the way it appeared in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Thomas H. Johnson. Regrettably, many early editors of Dickinson’s poems dropped the fourth stanza. The above poem includes the sometimes missing 4th stanza.