"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.
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History
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." The "old song" may have been the ballad "The Rambling Boys of Pleasure" which contains the following verse:
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.
Location
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 roof thatching materials. "Salley" or "sally" is a form of the Standard English word "sallow", i.e., a willow tree of the genus Salix. It is close in sound to the Irish word saileach, which also means willow.
Musical settings
The verse was set to music by Herbert Hughes to the traditional air "The Maids of Mourne Shore" in 1909. In the 1920s composer Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979) set the text to her own music. The composer John Ireland (1879–1962) set the words to an original melody in his song cycle Songs Sacred and Profane, written in 1929–31. There is also a vocal setting by the poet and composer Ivor Gurney, which was published in 1938. Benjamin Britten published a setting of the poem in 1943, using the tune Hughes collected. In 1988, the American composer John Corigliano wrote and published his setting.
Hughes' setting is recorded by individuals and groups including:
John McCormack (1941)
Peter Pears, with piano accompaniment by Britten (1944)
Kathleen Ferrier (1949)
Alfred Deller (1958)
Kenneth McKellar (1960)
Marianne Faithfull (on Come My Way, 1965)
Clannad on multiple albums including Clannad in Concert (1979)
Courage of Lassie on Sing or Die (1990)
Maura O'Connell and Karen Matheson for Transatlantic Sessions 2 (1998)
The Rankin Family on Collection (1996)
Órla Fallon on The Water is Wide (2000)
Andreas Scholl on Wayfaring Stranger (2001)
Redbird on Redbird (2003)
Méav Ní Mhaolchatha on A Celtic Journey (2006)