Rabbi ben Ezra

Rabbi ben Ezra is a poem by Robert Browning about Abraham ibn Ezra (1092-1167), one of the great poets, mathematicians and scholars of the 12th century. He wrote on grammar, astronomy, the astrolabe, etc.

The poem begins:

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be...

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, theistic paradox, that good might lie in the inevitability of its absence:

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:
brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.

The poem was published in Browning's Dramatis Personae in 1864.

See also

• Pebble in the Sky (SF novel by Isaac Asimov that mentions the poem)
• The Anglo-Chinese School in Singapore adopted their school motto, "The Best Is Yet To Be", from the second line of this poem.
• Grow Old With Me, a song by John Lennon, based in part on Browning's poem.

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Rabbi Ben Ezra