W. R. Rodgers, Poet

“In Ireland why a man becomes a poet is a question not to be asked,” writes Darcy O’Brien in W. R. Rodgers (1970), his fine memoir of the poet from the Bucknell University Press Irish Writers Series. Yet unlike the typical Irish poet, Rodgers did not really discover the poetry in himself until he was nearing the age of thirty and busy with his life as a Presbyterian minister in Loughgall, a town outside Belfast in County Armagh in Northern Ireland. Born, raised, and educated in Belfast, Rodgers was familiar with the sectarian conflicts that simmered and surged throughout his lifetime. “Everything in Belfast had two sides,” he wrote in his 1955 radio piece, “The Return Room”: “Even the walls of Belfast took sides.” “In Belfast,” O’Brien quotes Churchill, “they do everything but eat the bodies.”

Rodgers had been inspired when, in his late twenties, he began to read the work of contemporary poets such as W. H. Auden. And in his early poems one can detect certain threads in subject and diction that could be traced back to Auden:

Escape (1940)

The roads of Europe are running away from the war,
Running fast over the mined bridge and past the men
Waiting there, with watch, ready to maim and arrest them,
And strong overhead the long snorings of the planes’ tracks
Are stretching like rafters from end to end of their power.
Turn back, you who want to escape or want to forget
The ruin of all your regards. You will be more free
At the thoughtless centre of slaughter than you would be
Standing chained to the telephone-end while the world cracks.

Rodgers’ world was not one that celebrated poetry, however. As he once wrote in an unsigned article in the Belfast magazine, The Bell, “[The Ulsterman] would like to have eloquence. But he suspects and hates eloquence that has no bone of logic in it. It seems to him glib, spineless, and insincere.” After he published his first collection, Awake! and Other Poems (1941), Rodgers’ father cautioned him, “I wouldn’t tell anybody. They’ll think you are wasting your time.”

Rodgers had a clear-eyed understanding of his position in the community, which he never fully settled into. As he wrote in a late unpublished essay quoted in O’Brien’s book,

A rural community is a close and intricate wickerwork of human relationships and functions. Each person born into it, or brought into it, is given a pertinent role to fill and is always identified with this role. The role I was called to fill was that of parson and, being young, I found it a formidable one. Old men, full of worldly experience, farmers who never hesitated to advise me on practical matters, would at once defer to me, as sons to a father, when it came to other-worldly matters and spiritual crises. Not that they were impressed by my personal authority; authority for them resided in the role and office which I happened to occupy … I realised that I, as an individual, did not matter, and this in a way was a relief to me as well as an instruction. I do not know how one would carry the problems of a community if one were only oneself. The danger, of course–and this goes for all men who fill a public role and wear a public mask, parson or politician–the danger is that a man may end by confusing the office with himself. If this happens he becomes simply a mask, an empty shell, a private bore in public and a public bore in private.

The pull of poetry was difficult for Rodgers to resist. Unhappy in the constraints of his position in the conservative Protestant community of Loughgall and caught in a difficult marriage to a woman doctor who struggled with schizophrenia, he reached out by letters to other writers in Ireland and England and took long trips to Dublin that were escapes into the world of literature and long conversations over Guinness and whiskey. When his friend and fellow poet Louis MacNeice helped arrange a job with the BBC, Rodgers resigned from his ministry and moved to England.

At the BBC, he worked on a series of portraits of Irish writers, using a sound mosaic technique that was pioneering at the time but is now a staple of many radio documentaries. These were later collected and published after his death in Irish Literary Portraits (1973). Rodgers found his niche among the hard-drinking and ever-talking community of writers such as Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan. As O’Brien writes, “Rodgers’s drinking was an extraordinary thing to behold. He was never ostentatious about it. He drank as he did everything else, quietly and sacramentally, glass upon glass in steady unmeasured procession, his talk dilating along with his arteries and filling the room like the smoke from his pipe.” He established a place among his peers so successfully that in 1951, after the death of George Bernard Shaw, they elected him to the empty seat in the Irish Academy of Letters.

Though he generally avoided verse, a strong touch of the lyric shines throughout Rodgers’ poetry. It’s a shame that no recordings of his reading are available online, because one can well imagine how fine his words would sound, as in this opening from “The Net”:

Quick, woman, in your net
Catch the silver I fling!
O I am deep in your debt,
Draw tight, skin-tight, the string,
And rake the silver in.
No fisher ever yet
Drew such a cunning ring.

And he could create images as deft and elegant as a piece by Mozart:

The Fountains

Suddenly all the fountains in the park
Opened smoothly their umbrellas of water,
Yet there was none but me to miss or mark
Their peacock show, and so I moved away
Uneasily, like one who at a play
Finds himself all along, and will not stay.

An autobiographical piece he wrote for the BBC, “The Return Room,” has been called “one of the most important literary texts to have emerged from Northern Ireland,” “one of the most important Irish poems of the twentieth century,” and “an Under Milk Wood for Belfast.” Unavailable for decades, it was published in a collector’s edition that included a CD of the original radio broadcast by Blackstaff Press in 2010.

Though he never returned to live in Ireland, its memories and spirit never left him. And he maintained a strong sense of connection to the church even after leaving it. He wrote a sequence of poems based on the last days of Jesus, Resurrection, which includes the following:

It is always the women who are the Watchers
And keepers of life: they guard our exits
And our entrances. They are both tomb and womb,
End and beginning. Bitterly they bring forth
And bitterly take back the light they gave.
The last to leave and still the first to come,
They circle us like sleep or like the grave.
Earth is their element, and it it lies
The seed and silence of the lighted skies,
The seasons with their fall and slow uprise,
Man with his sight and militant surmise.
It is always the women who are the Watchers
And Wakeners.

Rodgers was never a prolific poet, and he struggled increasingly with writer’s block as he entered his fifties. In his introduction to Collected Poems (1971), available on the Open Library (link), Dan Davin recalls how Rodgers promised for years to provide a poem, to be titled “Epilogue,” for a collection Davin was editing:

Indeed I have been working at the Epilogue…. But I have been frustrated, distracted, tormented and halted by trouble with landlord and solicitors–and the domestic reverberations of it….

Later

Working on it both excites and depresses me, and I realize that to write about it is like opening an old wound, which is Ireland.

Later

I have not ignored or neglected the Epilogue. I’m writing some good stuff for it, only it takes a lot of architecting…. An incidental, but exacting, bother is that once I get into the Epilogue it starts other hares in my mind and I tend to fly off in pursuit of them and have to remind myself that I haven’t the time and that they’ll run another day.

Still later

I feel like a robin that has got mixed up in a badminton match.

In the end, “Epilogue” was never completed. Davin included the fragments he was able to assemble from Rodgers’ papers as an appendix to Collected Poems. In them, Rodgers offers perhaps a clue to his reticence:

Patient in graveyards, used to thinking long
And walking short, remembering what
My careful father told me–“If ever, son,
You have to go anywhere and have to
Run, never go! It’s unlucky.”

Rodger was saved briefly from his predicament when he was offered a temporary position on the faculty of Pitzer College in Claremont, California. There, he relied on recordings of his BBC shows to fill up most of his lectures on Irish writers, enjoyed the California sun, and despised the produce, which he considered “flavorless.” During his second year at Pitzer, he was told that his contract would not be renewed, and while on a trip to England that year, he fell ill and operated on to remove a cancerous tumor from his bowels. When he was well enough to return to California, he was able to get another position at nearby Cal Poly Pomona. In the fall of 1968, however, he found himself unable to eat and he was hospitalized again.

As a part-time employee with no health insurance, he was admitted to the Los Angeles County General Hospital. “He would not, of course, have been in such a place had he been in England or in Northern Ireland, nor even in the Republic of Ireland,” O’Brien writes in his memoir. “He had to be in America to end his life in a ward crowded with the oppressed: blacks, Mexican-Americans, and W. R. Rodgers. … [B]eing the man he was, he would sooner have died among wretches than rich men.” At his funeral service in Claremont, one of his colleagues at Pitzer, Bert Meyers, read a poem in tribute:

I know a candle of a man
whose voice, meandering in a flame,
could make the shadows on the wall
listen to what he said.

He’s done. You’d need a broom
to arouse him now. All things burn,
writhe, shrink, dissolve, or drift away.
Some men are words that warm a room.

In March of 1969, Rodger’s family and a few of his friends returned with his body to Loughgall, where his body was interred in the graveyard of Cloveneden Church.

A collection of Rodgers’ Poems, edited by Michael Longley and still available from the Gallery Press in Ireland.