“…The wide world has not wealth to buy / The power in my right hand!”

I actually heard the same poem on the way to work. I enjoyed it as well. I remember a line along the lines of:

“…and the whole world has not the wealth to purchase the power I have in my right hand…”

I like that.

Here’s an amusing story for you: on the way to work after voting this morning, I was listening to MPR and a guest read a poem on the air by John Greenleaf Whittier about voting. I enjoyed the poem so much that I wanted to find the text to read for myself. As a good techie, I began with Google searches. Unfortunately, “John Greenleaf Whittier” returned plenty of sites, just none that included the poem on voting — of which, by this time, I had forgotten the title. Two hours were spent, off and on, attempting different searches of Google and MPR.org when it suddenly hit me: I work in a library! A quick search of the library’s database, a minute’s walk through the stacks, and, lo and behold, there is a book of Whittier’s complete works on the shelf before me. Glancing through the contents I found the poem I had been searching for all morning: “The Poor Voter on Election Day”. Because I still cannot find a decent electronic version of the poem to cite, I will leave it up to you to find a written version because I don’t want to take up all of Erik’s blog space with poetry…. If only I had my own space to post these kinds of things….

-jed