Tagore's prayer

The following poem has become an Election Eve tradition on my blogs: Vocal Yokels (no longer exists), I See My Dreams (archived HERE) and now DemWit.

The poet is Rabindranath Tagore of India, Nobel Laureate in Literature, 1913. Here is the English translation of his beautiful prayer:

Where the Mind Is without Fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free,
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls,
Where words come out from the depth of truth,
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection,
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit,
Where the mind is led forward by Thee
Into ever-widening thought and action,
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father,
Let my country  awake!

***

FROM DEMWIT, Election Eve 2008

USA TODAY/GALUPP, 2 November 2008:

As the 2008 presidential campaign draws to an end, the final USA Today/Gallup pre-election poll shows Barack Obama with a 55% to 44% advantage over John McCain in the allocated estimate of the 2008 presidential vote.

USAToday/Gallup: 2 November 2008:

Gallup’s final pre-election allocated estimate of the national 2008 vote for Congress gives the Democrats a 12 percentage-point lead over the Republicans among traditional likely voters, 53% to 41%.

***

ELECTION EVE, 2010:

USAToday/Gallup, 31 October 2010:

The final USA Today/Gallup measure of Americans' voting intentions for Congress shows Republicans continuing to hold a substantial lead over Democrats among likely voters, large enough to suggest that regardless of turnout, the Republicans will win more than the 40 seats needed to give them the majority in the U.S. House.

USAToday/Gallup, 31 October 2010:

Likely voters are more apt to be using their vote to send a message that they oppose the president than support him. Also, voters backing GOP candidates are more likely than those backing Democrats to be casting their vote against the opposing candidate. These and other patterns conform with prior midterms in which power changed hands.

***

“Let my country awake.”