
Luke Batterham
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Senior Valuer
THE SLIGO BOY IN AMERICAN HIGH SOCIETY: this line is from the 'Introductory Rhymes' to Responsibilities where Yeats addresses his forebears and apologises for his childlessness; chief among these forebears being his grandfather William Pollexfen, beloved of his childhood in Sligo: 'You most of all, silent and fierce old man,/ Because the daily spectacle that stirred/ My fancy, and set my boyish lips to say,/ "Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun"'.
The quotation was written out during Yeats's four month tour of America after the Great War, undertaken to raise money for the recently-purchased Tower at Ballylee. It is hard to imagine a sharper contrast between Yeats's idealised Sligo childhood as invoked by this quotation and Miss Porter's School, cradle of the upper echelons of American womanhood (the aim of the present-day school being to educate 'young women to become informed, bold, resourceful and ethical global citizens' in the expectation that they will go on 'to shape a changing world').