Sally gardens benjamin britten3/15/2024 ![]() He could only remember a few lines but acknowledged his debt to the original version by calling his new poem, An Old Song Re-sung. In a note on the poem, he said that he was trying to reconstruct an old song he had heard being sung by a woman in the village of Ballisodare in Sligo. Yeats published the poem in his collection, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems in 1889. Yeats was trying to recreate an old Irish folk song We are not told why but the presumption is that he tried to move too fast and so frightened her away. However, he “was young and foolish and with her did not agree”. She urges him to “take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree”. It’s a kind of lament by a young man who meets a beautiful girl in the Salley Gardens but then loses her, presumably for failing to accept what she has to say. ![]() Ironically, considering it was written by a great poet regarded by many as a literary genius, the song is one of the simplest you will find anywhere in the Irish music repertoire. Down by the Salley Gardens, my love and I did meet W B Yeats Nevertheless, it has become one of the most recorded Irish songs of all time and has attracted the attention of performers from widely different musical backgrounds. Down by the Salley Gardens has an unusual background for a song that has passed into the Irish folk music tradition.ĭown by the Salley Gardens was written by W B Yeats, who is generally known as one of Ireland’s greatest poets and not usually associated with being a song writer.
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