Emily Dickinson :: Anne Anthony

Emily Dickinson

​For the seventh-grade talent show,  I performed something different from the other girls — I couldn’t sing, I couldn’t dance, and forget the baton twirling — so I read poetry. It wasn’t until recently while reflecting on one of the poems I selected that I realized why my 13-year-old self chose this poem. 
​
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
 
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!
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              —Emily Dickinson
​
At the time, I struggled with my place in the world; in the middle of my large six-child family and in school where other girls had grown up together while I was a transplant from another town. As a child, I read this poem literally, feeling like a nobody. Now, looking back, Dickinson’s deeper message of social presence, of it not being so important makes it clearer to me that I used the idea that it really didn’t matter as a strategy to pass through that awkward phase of my life. Dickinson’s poem, though written in the mid-1900s, still holds true today and perhaps even more so. A recent Wall Street Journal article noted that “Growing up means being left out sometimes, especially when friends splinter into new social groups during middle school and teen years. With group chats and social media, kids can more easily see when they’re not part of the crowd.” (Wall Street Journal)

Poetry offers a way for young adults to connect to the deep, unconscious (and sometimes not so unconscious) stirrings of their hearts by reading and writing poetry as a way to express their emotions.                                                               
​                                                                           ~Anne Anthony

---