Rabbi Ben Ezra by Robert Browning

First published: 1864, in Dramatis Personae

Type of poem: Dramatic monologue

The Poem

“Rabbi Ben Ezra” is a long poem of 192 lines expressing Robert Browning’s optimistic philosophy of life regarding both youth and old age. Youth is a time of struggle for glimpses of God’s omnipotence in an imperfect world. Old age can usher in the wisdom of spiritual maturity that comes from recognizing divine perfection behind earthly imperfection and from perceiving God’s unbounded love as well as God’s omnipotence.

Abraham Ibn Ezra (1092?-1167) was a Spanish rabbi who, in his middle years, was driven by persecution from Spain into a life of travel and scholarship. He was a theologian, a philosopher, a linguist, and a scientist. A strong believer in immortality, he found the second half of his life much more productive and satisfactory than the first half. The ideas of the poem are Browning’s, and they are not always in accord with the rabbi’s actual sentiments.

The first stanza of the poem enunciates the philosophy of the whole work and begins a series of exhortations encouraging readers to look forward to the aging process that brings a mature faith in God’s providence to take what is defective and partial in this world of seeming limitations and to make all right and whole.

Stanzas 2 through 9 refuse to chastise youth for the frustrated ambitions, doubts and confusions, and unsatisfying pleasures that serve the useful purpose of redirecting human striving for higher spiritual goals. Humankind was born to struggle and aspire and not to rest, as animals do, in a satiety of low material pleasures. A divine spark energizes the human heart into undertaking a quest for infinite satisfactions centered in God.

Stanzas 10 through 19 note that the experience of youth, with its glimpses of God’s power and perfection, prepare for the greater wisdom of old age and the discovery of God’s perfect love during the evolution of humans from brutes to spiritual beings whose struggle for oneness with God continues even in the hereafter. Therefore, let all that makes up humans—youth and age, body and soul—be cherished in their evolving spirituality and quest for the divine.

Stanzas 20 through 25 affirm that the perception of ultimate truth in old age transcends the disputations of youth, the disparate convictions of confused thinkers, or the voguish values of the masses. On the contrary, knowledge of the “Right/ And Good and Infinite” rests on our intimations of immortality and those faint “Fancies” or intuitions of something immeasurably greater, too often ignored by the vulgar populace.

Stanzas 26 through 36 elaborate on the biblical metaphor of God as the divine potter who molds the clay of a human’s spiritual nature on the spinning wheel of the world of time and transient matter (“He fixed thee ’mid this dance/ Of plastic circumstance”). Under the divine fashioning of the struggling and striving human clay, humans are ultimately wrought into a heavenly chalice of spiritual perfection for the slaking of the thirst of their Creator. Thus, human life in youth, age, and death has a providential purpose of attaining spiritual perfection.

Forms and Devices

“Rabbi Ben Ezra” is a dramatic monologue of thirty-two stanzas, each consisting of six lines with an experimental rhyme scheme (aabccb). The prevailing meter is iambic trimeter (“Grów óld ǎlǒng wǐth mé!”), but the rhyming third and sixth lines in each stanza employ iambic pentameter (“Thě lást ǒf lífe, fǒr whích thě fírst wǎs máde”). The musical effect of short and long lines of iambic beats is an alternating staccato and legato (smooth) sound system that parallels the sense of the poem’s alternating concern with dynamic yearnings and divine satisfactions, where human yearnings have their ultimate rest. Consonance and assonance permeate the poem (“Grow old along with me!/ The best is yet to be”).

The primary paradox of the poem is the reconciliation of the oppositions of earthly imperfection and divine perfection by affirming that doubt and limitation teach humanity faith in ultimate spiritual fulfillment (“For thence,—a paradox/ Which comforts while it mocks”). Metaphors abound. Human aspirations are implicitly compared to plucking flowers (lines 7-9), admiring stars (lines 10-12), and waging chivalric war (lines 79-84). Throughout the poem, the dichotomy of the material and spiritual sides of human nature is metaphorically expressed through the contraries of “clod” and “spark”; brutish “beast” and “god in the germ”; and “flesh” and “soul, in its rose-mesh.” These metaphors, in turn, feed into the poem’s climactic metaphor of the potter (God) molding clay (a human’s spiritual nature) on a spinning wheel (the world of time and transient matter) to transform humanity into a heavenly chalice of spiritual perfection, slaking the thirst of the Creator.

Two biblical passages inspired Browning’s metaphor of the potter. First, Isaiah 64:8, “But now, O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we are all the work of thy hand.” Also Romans 9:21, where Paul asks, “Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?”

Browning was a modern master of the dramatic monologue, a poetic form in which a single person speaks, often at a moment of crisis, for the purpose of revealing both the self and the society conditioning the speaker. “Rabbi Ben Ezra” is not typical of Browning’s best dramatic monologues, because the poem is less a revealing portrayal of the speaker and his age and is more a declamatory presentation of the author’s optimistic, faintly Neoplatonic Christian philosophy of life.

The language and syntax are characteristic of Browning’s elliptical, rough, and even grotesque style that so appealed to modernist poets of the twentieth century and that captured the dynamic incongruities of Browning’s aspiring, struggling humanity in an imperfect world. For example, line 24 is typically difficult, rushed, compressed, and experimental: “Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?” Its labored phrasing communicates the question: Do care and doubt bother the bird and brute whose bellies are full? The answer is no. Only a heaven-starved humanity needs more than finite satisfactions.