William Robert Rodgers

William Robert Rodgers Poems

William Robert Rodgers Biography

William Robert Rodgers (1909 – 1969), known as Bertie, and born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, was probably best known as a poet, but was also a prose essayist, a book reviewer, a radio broadcaster and script writer, a lecturer and, latterly, a teacher, as well as a former Presbyterian minister. He was born in Belfast and grew up in Mountpottinger in the east of the city. At school he showed a talent for writing and went on to read English at Queen's University Belfast where he won a number of prizes for literary essays, graduating in 1931. On completion of his degree, he entered Presbyterian Theological College and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1935. He was first appointed to Loughgall Presbyterian Church, Loughgall, County Armagh, where he was minister for 12 years. In 1936 he married Marie Harden Waddell, a medical doctor who set up practice in the village. Awake! and Other Poems (1941) was given glowing reviews in Britain and America, although the first edition was almost totally lost when the publisher’s warehouse was destroyed in the London Blitz. His wife became ill (later diagnosed as schizophrenia) and they left Loughgall temporarily in 1943, she to seek treatment, he to write in Oxford. He returned to Loughgall after a year but resigned from his ministry in 1946 to take up post at the BBC in London as a scriptwriter for the newly established BBC Third Programme after being approached by Louis MacNeice and offered a post. He involved himself in the Regionalist movement among Ulster writers in the 1940s and 1950s and contributed to a number journals which were used as a vehicle for the regionalist movement such as Lagan, The Bell and Rann. He collaborated with Louis MacNeice in the unpublished The Character of Ireland.)

The Best Poem Of William Robert Rodgers

Stormy Day

O look how the loops and balloons of bloom
Bobbing on long strings from the finger-ends
And knuckles of the lurching cherry-tree
Heap and hug, elbow and part, this wild day,
Like a careless carillon cavorting;
And the beaded whips of the beeches splay
And dip like anchored weed round a drowned rock,
And hovering effortlessly the rooks
Hang on the wind's effrontery as if
On hooks, then loose their hold and slide away
Like sleet sidewards down the warm swimming sweep
Of wind. O it is a lovely time when
Out of the sunk and rigid sumps of thought
Our hearts rise and race with new sounds and sights
And signs, tingling delightedly at the sting
And crunch of springless carts on gritty roads,
The caught kite dangling in the skinny wires,
The swipe of swallow across the eyes,
Striped awnings stretched on lawns. New things surprise
And stop us everywhere. . . .

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