Poems I Journey With 3

As Irish children we were all brought up on a literary diet that included the work of perhaps the greatest poet in English of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939). As early as 1923, when he was 58 years of age he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, being the first Irish writer to be so honoured. The Nobel citation described his poems as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation."

One of the poems/songs we learnt at primary school was one called "Down by the Salley Gardens" and it it is a song recorded by many singers since. Yeats wrote a note in one of his papers that this song/poem 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." That old song, experts tell us, was "The Rambling Boys of Pleasure."  Yeats' reconstruction of this song is as follows, and it is a song of regret for opportunities not grasped:

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 leaves grow on the trees
But I being young and foolish with her would not agree.

In a field down by the 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.

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 life easy as the leaves grow on the trees,
But I was young and foolish, and with her did not agree.

Below is the sung version of this poem/song by one of my favourite female singers - Maura O'Connell: