Identity: A Sonnet
That I am I, I surely know full well ;
I know my littleness and little place,
And how I feebly run my life's great race ;
Yet if an angel came with power to tell
Me how to be another I, and dwell
In his environment and ampler space,
Myself, annihilate; I'd set my face,
And be myself, though prisoned in a cell.
God made me, me, in changeless entity,
And could I be another, where were I ?
'Tis not that others are not nobler far ;
My light a spark, the while they sun-like shine
But living here or in some distant star,
Their lives are theirs, and mine for ever mine.