Down by the Salley Gardens by W. B. Yeats
Quick answer: Down by the Salley Gardens by W. B. Yeats explained: the folk song origins, the take love easy refrain, and the craft of its two perfect quatrains.
Yeats was honest about where this poem came from. He published it in 1889, in his first collection, with a note explaining it was an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an elderly woman in a Sligo village. The reconstruction succeeded so completely that it went back into the tradition: set to the air 'The Maids of Mourne Shore' in 1909, it is now sung as if it had always been a folk song, which, in a sense, it now is.
Salley means willow, from the Irish saileach; salley gardens were plots of willow grown for thatching, and a known meeting place for couples. In eight lines, a speaker remembers being advised to take love easy, twice, and failing to listen, twice. It is the shortest tragedy in the Yeats canon.
The poem
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 tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.
W. B. Yeats, 'Down by the Salley Gardens' (1889)
What the poem says
The first quatrain is the meeting: down by the salley gardens the speaker and his love met, and she passed the gardens 'with little snow-white feet'. Her advice comes with a natural image attached: take love easy, 'as the leaves grow on the tree'. But he, 'being young and foolish', would not agree. Nothing else happens in the stanza; the whole drama is a proverb offered and declined.
The second quatrain repeats the scene in a new location, a field by the river, where she laid her snow-white hand on his leaning shoulder and told him to take life easy, 'as the grass grows on the weirs'. The advice has widened from love to life, and the refusal widens to match. The last line breaks the pattern of past-tense narration and lands in the present: 'But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.' Between 'was' and 'am', an entire lifetime of consequence.
How it works
The poem is two quatrains of long, gently swaying seven-beat lines, rhymed in couplets, closer to sung metre than to literary pentameter. Its craft is the craft of folk song: parallel scenes, incremental repetition, and advice delivered through nature's way of doing things. Leaves grow on the tree and grass grows on the weirs without effort or hurry; the beloved's counsel is to love the way vegetation grows, and the images make the wisdom feel older than any speaker.
The two stanzas differ by small, deliberate increments: gardens become riverside, feet become hand, love becomes life. Incremental repetition is the oldest narrative engine in balladry, and Yeats uses it to compress years into the gap between stanzas. The final line's shift from 'would not agree' to 'now am full of tears' does what the whole of a novel's last chapter does, in eleven words.
Why it lasts, and what you can steal
It lasts because it is both personal and anonymous. Yeats supplied the art, the tradition supplied the voice, and the poem sits exactly on the seam, which is why singers, not just readers, have kept it alive for over a century. Regret this simply stated belongs to everyone who hears it.
Steal the incremental repetition: write two parallel stanzas in which scene, gesture and advice each shift by one degree, and let the shift imply the passage of time. Steal also the borrowed proverb: build a poem around one piece of folk advice phrased as a natural process, and let your speaker disobey it. A poem in this mode, songlike, structured, quietly devastating, is exactly the kind of entry that tends to linger with contest judges long after louder poems have finished shouting.
What poets can take from this
- Use incremental repetition: repeat a scene with one-degree shifts and let the shifts tell the story.
- Phrase advice as a natural process (leaves growing, grass on weirs) so wisdom feels ancient.
- Compress years into the tense shift between 'was' and 'am'.
- Write long swaying lines rhymed in couplets when you want a poem to be singable.
- Reconstruct something half-remembered, a song, a saying, a family story, and let the gaps be yours to fill.
Try it yourself
Take a piece of advice an older person once gave you, phrase it as something nature does effortlessly, and write two parallel quatrains: one where you refuse the advice, one where the present tense reveals what refusing cost.
Questions
What is Down by the Salley Gardens about?
A speaker remembers his young love advising him to take love and life easy, as naturally as leaves and grass grow. He was too young and foolish to agree, and now, years later, he is full of tears.
What does salley mean in the poem?
Salley means willow, from the Irish word saileach. Salley gardens were riverside plots of willow grown for thatching and basket-making, and traditionally a place where couples met.
Is Down by the Salley Gardens a folk song or a Yeats poem?
Both. Yeats reconstructed it in 1889 from three half-remembered lines of an old song sung by a Sligo villager, and after Herbert Hughes set it to a traditional air in 1909 it re-entered the folk repertoire.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.