Analysis of I Am Nobody, Who Are You

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Reading Response to I am Nobody.Who are You? As a famously secluded American poetess, Emily Dickinson spent her life in composing poems so as to construct her own fertile and profound spiritual world and thus remains a mysterious figure in the history of American literature. Through reading and analyzing the poem “I am Nobody.Who are You?”, I become more aware of and have a great esteem for her avoidance of fame and fortune. This essay intends to analyze the poem from three aspects: the function of “nobody” and “somebody” in the poem, the use of punctuation and the selection of images. First, let’s look at the two most important words in the poem: “nobody” and “somebody”.There are two ways to understand the word “nobody”, one is “small potatoes” who have no talent or capability or thoughts, the other is someone who are talent and capable, but refuse to boast himself, or even refuse to let others know himself. Based on Emily’s attitudes towards life, as well as her great contribution to literature, “nobody” should be translated to the person who is capable but refuses to gain fame. And her “nobody” is truly somebody.And the word “somebody” stands on the opposition side of “nobody”.To be "somebody" is to have status in society; society, the majority, excludes or rejects those who lack status or are "nobody"--that is, "they'd banish us" for being nobody. And through the comparison of these two, it is easy to find that Emily Dickinson was implying that to be a “nobody” is much better than to be a dreary “somebody”—for being somebody means being too busy keeping the names in circulation and it is not as fancy as it seems to be. Second, we are going to appreciate this poem from the use of punctuation.in an original version, we could find that she used nine times of dash, six times of exclamation mark and two times of question mark. With these punctuations,
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