Robert Browning (Rabbi ben Ezra).
“All (that) I could never be, All (that) man ignored in me.” All that the world could not know, a man’s thoughts, desires, and intentions, all that he wished or tried to be or do, although unknown to his fellows, have their value in God’s eyes. Man is the Cup, whose shape (i.e., character) has been formed by the wheel of the great Potter, God. See further as to this Eastern metaphor.
The late Mrs. A. W. Verrall, widow of Doctor Verrall and herself a brilliant scholar, pointed out in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, June, 1911, a probable connection between “Rabbi ben Ezra,” and “Omar Khayyam,” and I do not think that her interesting views have been published elsewhere.
Both poems centre round the idea of man as a Cup, but treat the metaphor from very different standpoints. Omar’s cup (quoting from the first edition) is to be filled with “Life’s Liquor” (ii), with “Wine! Red Wine!” (vi), with what “clears To-Day of past regrets” (xx); the object is to drown the memory of the fact that “without asking” we are “hurried hither” and “hurried hence” (xxx); the “Ruby Vintage” is to be drunk “with old Khayyam,” and “when the Angel with his darker Draught draws up” to us we are to take that draught without shrinking (xlviii). On the other hand Rabbi ben Ezra’s Cup is to be used by the great Potter. We are told to look “not down but up! to uses of a cup” (30). The Rabbi asks “God who mouldest men ... to take and use His work” (32) and the ultimate purpose of the Cup, when it has been made “perfect as planned,” is to slake the thirst of the Master.
The comparison of man to the Clay of the Potter in both poems is not sufficient in itself to show any connection between them. Such a comparison is found, as Fitzgerald reminds us, “in the Literature of the World from the Hebrew Prophets to the present time”[30]; and it is as appropriately employed by the Hebrew as by the Persian thinker. But Mrs. Verrall has other grounds:
The little pamphlet in its brown wrapper containing the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was first published by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859, and, as is well known, attracted so little attention that, although there were only 250 copies, it found its way into the two-penny boxes of the book-sellers, (It now sells for about £50!) But, nevertheless, the poem was eagerly read and enthusiastically praised by a small group, among whom were Swinburne and Rossetti. In 1861 Robert Browning came to live in London, and often saw Rossetti, who was his friend. It is, therefore, very improbable that he did not learn of the poem, which had so impressed Rossetti. In 1864 “Rabbi ben Ezra” was published in the volume called Dramatis Personae.
Again, there is intrinsic evidence that Browning intended a direct refutation of Omar’s theory of life. Compare verses 26 and 27 of “Rabbi ben Ezra” with verses xxxvi and xxxvii of “Omar Khayyam” (first edition).
Omar says that he “watched the Potter thumping his wet clay,” and, thereupon advises:
Ah, fill the Cup;—what boots it to repeat
How Time is slipping underneath our Feet: