I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

“I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” consists of eight lines, or two four-line stanzas known as quatrains. While the form is not entirely consistent, there is the presence of iambic trimeter, or a pattern of unstressed/stressed within three pairs of syllables, with two lines following iambic tetrameter, a pattern of unstressed/stressed within four pairs of syllables, throughout the poem. There are certain exceptions in which the syllabic pairs are trochaic, stressed/unstressed, rather than iambic. No consistent rhyme scheme is present in both quatrains, yet a description of the rhyme might be AABC in Stanza 1 and ABCB in Stanza 2, as end rhyme is used: “you” / “too” (Lines 1-2) and “frog” / “bog” (Lines 6, 8). Many of the line endings have an exclamation point, which in today’s email and text culture might seem overused. Here, the use makes clear the speaker’s feelings that she is passionate about the subject—both on what she wants to be and what she does not want to be.

Dickinson uses caesura, or a pause in the middle of a line, through the employment of dashes to show emphasis and even mild hesitation before particular words. For example, in Line 2, she uses dashes around the word “Nobody” (Line 2) as if tentatively asking the reader if they share her “nobody” status.