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The Eyes Of The Storm By Robert Browning Essay

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Robert Browning in his poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra” writes,
“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made.” (1-3)
Lingering in a state of what people called old age, Elizabeth Hunter, the protagonist of The Eye of the Storm by Patrick White, gathers strength and resilience from her past to defeat the horrors of old age and death and discovers an entirely new meaning to her later life sitting in that luxurious bed at her residence in Moreton Drive. The egoistical matriarch, now physically powerless refuses to yield her strength to the temporality of life and the inevitability of death. Old age is not mere bodily decay and deformation for her, rather it’s a stage where she colors her present by swinging back and forth into the past.
Elizabeth is no ordinary woman, even at the age of eighty six, she manages to be the cynosure that she was in her youth. What can we say about a woman in her seventies who tries to woo the guy meant to court her daughter? It must be as shocking as an eighty year old grandpa going to remarry! Strong willed and unbending Elizabeth commands and rules the lives of people around her. To Elizabeth, death is something which is subject to her will. “But I shan’t die – or anyway, not till I feel like it. I don’t believe anybody dies who doesn’t want to” (White 63). Dwindling in a state where “who you are seems to be restricted to who you were; your identity seems to shrink to the story of your retrospection”

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