Growing Old in Growning Old by Matthew Arnold and Rabbi Ben Ezra by Robert Browning Victorian contemporaries, Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning wrote the poems "Growning Old" and "Rabbi Ben Ezra", respectively, to express their views on aging. Arnold suffers tremendously, because he lives in melancholy solitude with his body deteriorating, helpless in his moral and physical pain. Browning, a happier man, finds much joy in his age and comfort in the moral and spiritual strength God gives him. Indeed, while Arnold dwells pessimistically on the physical pain that accompanies the aging process and the inevitability of a cruel death, Browning piously expresses his optimistic view of old age and death as God's final conclusion to the hardships of life. Arnold's pessimism about aging leaves no doubt. room for optimism. The reader immediately encounters this negativity, for in the first stanza Arnold notes, in response to his question "What does it mean to grow old?", that aging involves "[the loss] of the glory of form." The words "losing glory" imply a tragic and perhaps humiliating experience. Furthermore, Arnold describes the loss of the "glory of form" as a moment when "beauty [gives] up her garland," a phrase that presents the reader with an image of a queen abandoning her crown, as her time of glory ends forever. . Arnold gives the reader another haunting image of aging in line twenty-four, when he describes himself as incarcerated by his age with the image of the "hot prison of the present, month after month with weary pain." The words “hot,” “tired,” “prison,” and “pain” effectively portray Arnold's suffering and discomfort to the reader, while simultaneously lending to his overall pessimistic point of view. Furthermore, Arnold experiences an absence of feelings in accordance with his age. In the fourth stanza he declares that the death of old age does not involve looking down on the world with "rapt and prophetic eyes" and a "heart deeply moved / to cry and feel the fullness of the past." Furthermore, he writes, “Deep in our hidden hearts / rots the dull memory of a change / but no emotion, none.” One critic agrees, stating that Arnold's age induces an "emotional frigidity" (Madden 115). Another critic describes Arnold as having an “inability to feel” (Bush 50). As for the "tedious memory of a change," Madden adds, "There was always the memory of that 'different world' [that Arnold] had once known..." (115). Most likely, the "different world" that Madden speaks of is Arnold's youth, of which the poet has only a "dull memory" left, suggesting that Arnold finds no fulfillment or feeling in the memories of his youth..