Literary Technique: Repetition
Poem Example:
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
By Emily Dickinson
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!
Biographical Information: A poet who took definition as her province, Emily Dickinson challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. Like writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she crafted a new type of persona for the first person. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, like those in Brontë’s and Browning’s works, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. Like the Concord Transcendentalists whose works she knew well, she saw poetry as a double-edged sword. While it liberated the individual, it as readily left him ungrounded. The literary marketplace, however, offered new ground for her work in the last decade of the nineteenth century. When the first volume of her poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with stunning success. Going through eleven editions in less than two years, the poems eventually extended far beyond their first household audiences.
Explanation of Technique: Repetition is a literary device that repeats the same words or phrases a few times to make an idea clearer. This poem uses repetition by repeating the word 'Nobody'. By repeating 'Nobody' in the first stanza, it makes the poem more memorable and causes the reader to really think about what the poem is about.
Interpretation of Poem: The narrator of the poem first greets the reader by saying that they are both Nobodies, in other words, outsiders from the rest of society. She tells the reader to keep quiet or else the rest of society would announce it to everyone that there are two Nobodies. She then remarks how unfortunate it would be to be Somebody, or someone famous to society. She compares Somebodies to frogs. Frogs announce their presecence to the rest of the bog by croaking loudly. The poem's narrator conveys the idea that being a Nobody isn't all too bad, and it feels better than being a Somebody.
Visual Representation:
Explanation of Visual: In the poem, the narrator and the the reader are outsiders to society. The narrator compares famous, loud people to croaking frogs. Frogs spend their lives announcing their presence to the rest of the bog, while Nobodies keep to themselves and are keen on diverting attention away from themselves. The image matches the comparison made between frogs and Somebodies.
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