Folk Song: Down by the Salley Gardens
The Irish poet William Butler Yeats presented “Down by the Salley Gardens” as “an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman.” Originally titled “An Old Song Resung,” the poem was published in 1889 in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. In 1909, Herbert Hughs set Yeats’s poem to the wistful air The Maids of the Mourne Shore.
The word salley suggests a garden of weeping willow trees. A weir is a dam built across a river to control water levels.
Down by the salley gardens, my love and I did meet.
She passed the sally gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take life easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her did not agree,
In a field by a river, my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.
Painting: Lady in a Garden. Edmund Blair Leighton.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012