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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 Ezra's life and work suggests to Browning, but the poem is Robert Browning using Ezra as a mouthpiece, not the other way around. At the center of the poem is a 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.


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