I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
This is the first stanza of an Emily Dickinson poem as presented by its first publisher, who significantly dialed down the author's quirkiness (punctuationally and otherwise). The phrase "banish us" replaced what verb in the original text, which, to one as publicity-averse as Dickinson, might be a worse fate than banishment?
ADVERTISE