A lyrical life of St Francis of Assisi

Francis: A Life in Songs. By Ann Wroe. Jonathan Cape; 191 pages; £16.99

ST FRANCIS was Il Poverello—the little poor man. He was puny, wrote his first biographer Thomas di Celano, and his beard unkempt. In his youth he was the “ringleader” of Assisi’s vain and frivolous youth. He was a fighter, a wit in scarlet robes, a singer of troubadour ballads. After his call and conversion, he rent his flowing garments and wore a tunic patched with fox skin. He preached to the birds and they flew in the shape of a cross. He charmed the cricket that chirped (incessantly) outside his cell: “Sing, sister cicada, and give praise to your Lord.” He signed a treaty with a wolf that had terrorised the people of Gubbio. The wolf nodded to each clause and shook a paw to sign. He talked of brother ass and sister sparrow and rescued worms from trampling on the road. He cooled his lust in snow and scoured his naked flesh with thorns. Where his blood fell roses bloomed. He bore the pain of Christ’s stigmata, five wounds, in hands, and feet and side.

“There have been many lives of St Francis,” writes Ann Wroe in her introduction to “Francis: A Life in Songs”. Ms Wroe’s is a rare and beautiful telling. She takes the miracles of St Francis and sings them in four keys. First, she gives you the legend—the call, the first churches, the followers, the sermon to the birds, the stigmata—in St Francis’s own words and in those of his early biographers, di Celano and Saint Bonaventure. Then, she offers two poems: one “an evocation of Francis” in his own time, the other an echo of St Francis in the modern world. The fourth “grace-note”—enigmatic, epigrammatic—links each four-part section to the next. The metre of the poems is (almost) always four-beat: the rhythm of troubadour songs and “a conscious evocation of the fourfold sign of the Cross which, after his conversion, was the immovable centre and structure of his life”.

This is a book stamped with a brilliant seal. Ms Wroe, Obituaries editor of The Economist and the author of allusive lives of Pontius Pilate, Shelley and Orpheus, holds St Francis up to the light and turns him this way and that to catch the gleam. When Stanley Spencer made St Francis modern, he painted him as lumpen and plod-a-day, wearing a Whiteleys dressing-gown, with ducks and chickens clucking round his slippers. Ms Wroe’s St Francis is a more flickering presence, there in the sky and the sea, in unwanted pennies, in a mother plaiting her daughter’s hair, in a watering can, a tin of HP beans.

Ms Wroe’s recreation of the Sermon to the Birds is haunting. Unlike Spencer’s scene or Giotto’s in the Louvre, the birds do not flock at St Francis’s feet:

“They perched along
the gilded branches of a tree
like jeweller’s stock…
...They did not stir. Perhaps each phrase
slid off their smooth enamelled backs
like rain, like light. Yet on one limb
set separately the wisest bird,
wide-eyed and cowled, weighed every word.”

In the modern telling, the birds become gulls wheeling above Brighton’s Marine Parade, skirling, shrieking, shouting for bread crumbs:

“each waiting for its turn
to snatch a portion of allotted grace.”

Ms Wroe can be witty and teasing. She takes a line from Celano—“Jesus was always on his lips”—and imagines a young student toasting her Finals with beer cans:

“just completely nailed
the Hegel paper; it’s like, Oh my God,
she wrote six fucking sides! Jesus how good
was that?”

Her poems of the saint’s struggles with his lusts and demons are written in an ecstasy of devotion. St Francis sleeps naked on the ground in a cave at Eremo di Montecasale:

“Nothing between you now
lying alone.
Nothing at all between
Your flesh, her stone.”

There is something here of the inspired vision of William Blake and the elegiac bathos of Philip Larkin at his “Church Going” best. St Francis founded little churches and repaired old ones. He carried a broom to sweep the aisles. He, whose own weeping eyes gave him such trouble, would walk with joy the path to Ms Wroe’s damp church in Lullington, East Sussex, where:

“Lost spectacles left on the font
continue to enquire for grace.”

LAURA FREEMAN*

*Our policy is to identify the reviewer of any book by or about someone closely connected with The Economist. Laura Freeman is a freelance writer and the author of “The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite”