“Down by the Sally Gardens”.
Sung by: Maura O’Connell.
With Karen Matheson.
Available on YouTube
Poem by W. B. Yeats.
Down by the Sally Gardens
my love and I did meet;
She passed the Sally Gardens
with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy,
as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I being young and foolish
with her I did not agree.
In a field by the river
my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder
she placed 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 I am full of tears.
The following Text is from Wikipedia.
“Down by the Salley Gardens” (Irish: Gort na Saileán)
is a Poem by William Butler Yeats published in
Yeats indicated in a note that it was “an attempt to
reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballisodare, County Sligo, who often sings them to herself.”[2]
The “old song” may have been the ballad “The Rambling
Boys of Pleasure”[3] which contains the following verse:
Down by yon flowery garden
my love and I we first did meet.
I took her in my arms
and to her I gave kisses sweet
She bade me take life easy
just as the leaves fall from the tree.
But I being young and foolish,
with my darling did not agree.
The similarity to the first verse of the Yeats version
is unmistakable and would suggest that this was indeed
the song Yeats remembered the old woman singing.
The rest of the song, however, is quite different.
Yeats’s original title, “An Old Song Re-Sung”,
reflected his debt to “The Rambling Boys of Pleasure”.
The Poem first appeared under its present title
when it was reprinted in “Poems” in 1895.[4]
It has been suggested that the location of the “Salley Gardens” was on the banks of the river at Ballysadare, near Sligo,
where the residents cultivated trees to provide
“Salley” or “Sally” is a form of the Standard English
It is close in sound to the Irish word “Saileach”,
which also means Willow.
No comments:
Post a Comment