Rabbi ben Ezra
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"Rabbi ben Ezra" is a poem by Robert Browning about the famous Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (1092Template:Ndash1167), one of the great Jewish poets and scholars of the 12th century. He wrote on grammar, astronomy, the astrolabe, and other topics.
Analysis
The poem begins:
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Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be [...][1]
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It is not a biography of Abraham ibn Ezra; like all of Browning's historical poems, it is a free interpretation of the idea that ibn Ezra's life and work suggests to Browning. At the center of the poem is a theistic paradox that good might lie in the inevitability of its absence:
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For thence,—a paradox
Which comforts while it mocks,—
Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:
What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me:
A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.[1]
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History
The poem was published in Browning's Dramatis Personae in 1864.[2]
References
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See also
- Pebble in the Sky, a science fiction novel by Isaac Asimov that mentions the poem
- "Grow Old with Me", a song by John Lennon, based in part on Browning's poem
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