I really enjoyed reading Emily Dickinson’s poem 225, which presents a speaker who revels in the idea of being “nobody” rather than “somebody”. Overall, the poem seems to be a rejection of societal expectations and pressures to conform to a specific identity or status, and more specifically is challenging what the terms “nobody” and “somebody” and their connotations even really mean. I like the way the poem opens with such a playful tone, inviting the reader to sort of share in the speaker’s anonymity. It suggests right away that those who are “nobody” may actually be much more free or authentic in who they are. She contrasts within the second stanza using “bog” and “frog” vs. “the Admiring bog”. On the one hand, she seems to suggest that those who are seeking fame or recognition have a superficial existence, while those who embrace their anonymity might actually enjoy a more private, real, and deep sense of self. She ends with warning the reader that those like the frog who want to be “public” will actually lose freedom and integrity along the way, and may be stripped of their true identity. It is better to be “an admiring Bog” than a “public frog”. Based on what I know about Emily Dickinson, she was actually virulently opposed to publishing her work and disliked the pressure of her work being under public scrutiny, or of the process of poetry becoming somewhat of a job or something she owed others or the world. In many ways I’m sure this is why she kept most of her poems safe during her lifetime, and I can definitely understand how this portion of her biography and storyline may carry through within the undertones and message of this particular poem.
I was also struck by this poem. It appears a sharp contrast to — even perhaps a critique of — Whitman: Sure, he supposedly preached free thought and innovation of form/style via Leaves of Grass, was apparently inspired heavily by Emerson, and sought to transcend the individual self in the name of collective experience. However, Whitman published a book with a photograph of himself — arguably one of the most public mediums, loads of poetry that might even be interpreted as his sexual “coming out” to the world, and an endorsement of his work by Emerson. Here, Dickinson’s poem is not only about solitude and privacy — she “walks the walk,” having intended for her work to remain just that — private.
This poem almost feels like proof that she didn’t want her poems public, and eerily like a reproach to her reader — somehow she knew all along that the world would betray her privacy, and here she is calling all of her readers out on it. After all, isn’t anyone who reads it complicit? Perhaps the fact that, in spite of her wishes, the publishers didn’t care (that is, after her death and her poems were found) proves that Whitman was right all along: if we all die eventually, and if experience is continuous, cyclical, shared, collective, and repeated, then there’s no such thing as privacy or being a “nobody.” Or perhaps the state of being a “nobody” lies in the higher identity of shared experience. The very fact that we read this poem today totally refutes this poem, in a sense, doesn’t it? Emily Dickinson is definitely not a “nobody, “no matter how hard she may have tried to be.
Poem 225 is short, yet it feels dense to read because there is so much meaning that can be found. Your point, “Emily Dickinson is definitely not a “nobody, “no matter how hard she may have tried to be,” is very true, but at this point in time she was in a society that was really forcing women to be “nobodies”. She keeps her world hidden, in a sense, behind an eclipse, but still in the last line of the poem says, “I’m ‘Wife’! Stop there!” (interesting that wife is capitalized) but this felt like a representation of what society was forcing her to be, simply someone’s wife, and she was hiding her life that didn’t conform to this time because it was safer feeling for her.