Study Questions

1. How would you describe or characterize the speaker in this poem? What is she like in the first stanza? Does she seem
2. different in the second stanza?
3. Please read the poem out loud and decide why it has so many dashes.  Does it signify suspense, secrecy, and/or hesitancy?  How do you characterize the speaker, who speaks with long pauses?  This poem, in part, is about the spaces and distance between people.  Do the dashes, then, create a sense of distance and isolation? What other effects do they create?
4. What is the speakers relationship with "you"? Who is "you"? What new identity does the speaker take on by seeing herself as a a pair of us? Who are "they" mentioned in the first stanza?
5. Could the "you" in the first stanza be the "Somebody" in the second?  What more do we get to know about the speaker in this stanza?
6. More about literary techniques
7. Does Emily Dickensen's biography shed any light on this poem or the next one?
8. ( To interest you: "Dickinson had what appears to have been a normal childhood---was bright, witty, had friends, went to parties---but by her early 30's began a withdrawal which later became almost complete: there were occasions when even people whom she obviously loved had to speak with her from the other side of an ajar door.")
9. Do you see yourself as a somebody or nobody?  Or both or neither?
 
10. You can contrast the self this poem with two contemporary feminist songs: Sinead O'Connor's "Red Football, " &  Alanis Morissette's "Not the Doctor."  Can you explain the similarities and differences among them?