BIG OTHER

American green tree frog, with distended vocal sac

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you — Nobody — Too?
Then there’s the 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!

Fewer than a dozen (some sources put it between seven and ten) of Emily Dickinson’s nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime.