Ulick O'Connor so splendidly brings out the qualities not only of his main subject in Olive St John Gogarty, now recently reissued by the O'Brien Press, but those of some of his contemporaries. He tells us that AE was one of three friends (Griffith and Tom Kettle were the others) whom Gogarty regarded as beyond criticism. AE he thought of as almost a saint. He rushed to Bournemouth in July 1935 when he heard that AE was dying there, and as he leant over the bed, "he was rewarded by the deepening of the great blue light in AE's eyes". Gogarty heard him murmur: "I have realised all my ambitions. I have had an astonishing interest in life. I have had great friends. What more can a man want?" The surgeon in attendance, writes Ulick, turned away for a moment in tears.
Gogarty wrote in the next day's Irish Times: "The hero in the man looked out and it was his friends who had to brace themselves against life with its loss." AE, the philosopher, the Theosophist, the forever cycling organiser of the Irish Agriculture Organisation Society; AE the painter; AE the poet, AE the editor of The Irish Statesman, having already edited The Irish Homestead for the farmers. AE the poet, but perhaps above all, AE the benevolent friend of all.
In his collected poems, published in 1913, there is one often quoted: On behalf of some Irishmen not followers of Tradition. It opens: "They call us aliens, we are told/ Because our wayward visions stray ? From the dim banner they unfold,/ The dreams of worn-out yesterday." And closes: "We would no Irish sign efface,/ But yet our lips would gladlier hail/ The firstborn of the Coming Race/ Than the last splendour of the Gael." The last four lines of the poem are a challenge: "No blazoned banner we unfold./ One charge alone we give to youth,/ Against the sceptred myth to hold/ The golden heresy of truth."
And touching on the 1916 Rising, he wrote to his friend Charles Weekes: "I don't believe half-a-dozen persons in England and America care one farthing about what my opinion is upon the recent revolt in Ireland. Nobody, Unionist or Nationalist, agrees with my opinions. Personally I believe that there would have been no revolt if the employers and authorities had not been so unmerciful and unjust during the great strike. They left labour inflamed. If the authorities were waiting to make Dublin a place with bombs blazing in the streets there were going the right way about it. . .Connolly was the strong man and intellect in the rising."