Book Review: Charles of the Desert: A Life in Verse

Abstract

Charles of the Desert: A Life in Verse. By William Woolfitt. Brewster, Mass.: Paraclete Press, 2016. xii + 77 pp. $20.00 (paper).In the prelude to her magisterial nineteenth-century novel Middle-march, George Eliot describes the life of the Carmelite nun and reformer, St. Theresa of Avila. Eliot writes in the Prelude that Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life, but she also concedes that many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action. It required a special confluence of circumstances to produce St. Theresa. Dorothea Brooke, Eliot's protagonist and Theresas foil, yearned . . . after some lofty conception of the world. . . . She was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects (Book I, chap. 1). Unfortunately, her rashness-coupled with other events beyond Dorotheas control-leads to a poorly chosen marriage and unfulfilled dreams. Dorothea never becomes the great philanthropist that she hoped to be, and her life must be fulfilled by more mundane work. This problem is one of the central concerns of the novel: how is one to live a grace-filled life under graceless circumstances?Somewhere between St. Theresa and Dorothea falls the nineteenthcentury French saint Charles de Foucauld. William Woolfitts new collection, Charles of the Desert: A Life in Verse, is an exploration of a holy life that is both remarkable and unremarkable in turn. Ecstatic dreams are juxtaposed with eremitic drudgery, eucharistie awe with pedantic scribbling. It is in this way that Woolfitt portrays a life in which the relationship between the mundane and the numinous is left unresolved.As an attempt to imagine the inner life of a Christian exemplar, Woolfitts collection evokes the biographical poetry of Thom Satterlee (Burning Wyclif) or perhaps even T. S. Eliots classic play, Murder in the Cathedral. Woolfitt selects as his subject matter specific moments from de Foucauld's life: his relationship with his grandfather, the experience of the eucharist that drew de Foucauld back to the church, an apocalyptic vision. Each poem is dated, to allow the reader to locate the specific poem within de Foucauld s life. This makes Woolfitt s project something of an imaginary biography. The persona that Woolfitt-as-poet inhabits likely has more in common with Woolfitt himself than de Foucauld, and yet the timeline Woolfitt describes anchors his character in a very real story. The creative liberties that Woolfitt is able to take, then, are not Woolfitt overstepping himself, but rather Woolfitt being a good iconographer. …