Down By The Salley Garden

 
 W.B. Yeats
 
 I IV    I

Down by the Salley Gardens

IV V I

My love and I did meet.

 I   IV   V

She passed the Salley Gardens

IV V I

With little snow white feet.

    IV V   I

She bid me take life easy

IV V I

As the leaves grow on the tree

IV I

But I was young and foolish,

IV V I

With her did not agree.

In a field by the river

My love and I did stand.

And on my healing shoulder

She laid her snow white hand.

She bid me take love easy

As the grass grows on the wiers.

But I was young and foolish

And now I'm full of tears.

Down by the Salley Gardens

My love and I did meet.

She passed the Salley Gardens

With little snow white feet.

She bid me take love easy

As the grass grows on the wiers.

But I was young and foolish

And now I'm full of tears.

Down by the Salley Gardens (Irish: Gort na Saileán) is a poem by William Butler Yeats published in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems in 1889. 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, Sligo, who often sings them to herself."^[1] The "old song" may have been the ballad "The Rambling Boys of Pleasure".^[2]

"Salley" or "sally" is a form of the Standard English word "sallow", i.e., a tree of the genus Salix. It is close in sound to the Irish word saileach, meaning willow.