Margins / 24Notes From Beside The StorySeptember 16, 2026

Some Bodie

Notes from beside being a Nobody.

Emily Dickinson is one of my favorite writers.

And I’m Nobody! Who are you? has always been one of those poems that seems much larger than the few lines it occupies.

Dickinson likes being Nobody.

Not unknown, exactly.

Unadvertised.

And I mean that word quite literally.

In Dickinson’s handwritten manuscript, she writes:

Don’t tell! they’d advertise — you know!

But when the poem was first published after her death, advertise had become banish us. Her early editors changed more than that. They regularized her punctuation and capitalization, altered words, and made her poems fit more comfortably into the literary conventions of their time.

Later editions returned to Dickinson’s manuscripts.

And advertise returned with them.

I think that word matters.

Banish suggests that the danger of being Nobody is that the world might cast you out.

Advertise suggests almost the opposite.

The danger is that the world might find you.

Tell about you.

Make you public.

Make you Somebody.

And then Dickinson immediately tells us exactly what she thinks of that:

How dreary — to be — Somebody!How public — like a Frog —

I can't know exactly what Dickinson intended. But I know which reading makes more sense to me.

She wasn't worried about being left alone.

She seemed rather good at that.

She was worried about what happens when someone tells.

I've always liked that.

Possibly because I have spent most of my life telling people my name over and over anyway.

My last name is Bodie.

B-O-D-I-E.

It is pronounced Body.

Almost no one pronounces it that way the first time. Or even after being told.

I've been Boadie. Bo-dee. Bow-die. Bod-eye. Occasionally something so inventive that I have to admire the commitment.

So I correct it.

Bodie. Like body.

I've probably said that sentence thousands of times.

And somewhere in all the literary rabbit holes I've been disappearing into lately, I came back to Dickinson's Nobody and noticed something that has apparently been sitting inside my own name my entire life.

Nobody.

Somebody.

Anybody.

Everybody.

Bodie.

Well.

Miss Dickinson, I suppose I have a response.

Some Bodie

I’m Nikki Bodie! Who are you?Are you a Bodie — too?I’ve always thought that NobodyWas Somebody I knew.
How dreary — to be Somebody!Emily was right —To tell your name to EverybodyFrom morning into night!
For Everybody wants to beSomebody — so they say —And Any Bodie might be knownBy Everybody — someday —
A Nobody has somewhere stillThat No Bodie may know —A little room inside a nameWhere only she may go.
But I am already a Bodie —And that is quite enough —No need to make SomebodyOf all this mortal stuff.
But Emily — dear Nobody —There’s something you should know —Everybody knows your name —You’re Nobody no more.
So — I’m Nikki Bodie! Who are you?Be Anybody — do —But if you happen to be Nobody —
I rather like Nobody, too.

Maybe that's what I've always liked about Dickinson's Nobody.

She isn't saying she is nothing.

She's keeping something.

And I think there is a difference.

There is one more thing, though.

Emily was right to worry about someone telling.

They did.

After her death, her poems were found. They were edited. They were published. They were read.

They changed her.

They advertised her.

And now Everybody knows her name.

The woman who wrote I’m Nobody! became Somebody after all.

I don't know what Emily would have thought about that.

But I suspect she might have found it dreary.

Sources: The Emily Dickinson Museum on “I'm Nobody! Who are you?”

N.B.

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