Rabbi ben Ezra
"Rabbi ben Ezra" is a poem by Robert Browning about Abraham ibn Ezra (10921167), one of the great poets and scholars of the 12th century. He wrote on grammar, astronomy, the astrolabe, etc. The poem begins: 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: The poem was published in Browning's  Dramatis Personae in 1864. The protagonist believed that "a lunar eclipse at the beginning of an illness has a baneful influence, that a solar eclipse prolongs the period of sickness, and that a conjuction of planets or of the sun and the moon is a very dangerous sign", a belief that was common with the Greek-Alexandrinian sect of iatromathematicians. The opening lines are quoted in the 1978 TV movie "A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story", and it is speculated that this is the inspiration for the John Lennon song "Grow Old with Me". Rabbi ben Ezra