High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! 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.