Poem of the Day: ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’

To conclude the Sun’s celebration of William Butler Yeats this week, we return to the nascence of his poetic career. In 1889, the year his first full-length book, “The Wanderings of Oisin,” appeared, the twenty-four-year-old Yeats was living in London, steeping in the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite poets even while he studied Irish folklore. Today’s poem, “Down by the Salley Gardens,” suggests the Pre-Raphaelite impulse to recapture, or to recreate in improved form, something ancient. Yeats’s own note on this poem indicates that it represents his attempt to remember an old song, “from three lines imperfectly remembered” as they had been sung “by an old peasant woman.” The poem’s overall effect, like that of Tuesday’s selection, “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” is not exactly the suggestion of a replicated artifact — the poetic equivalent of a resin model of the Rosetta Stone — but of an entity synthesized out of actual artifacts whose very existence in tradition extends the patina of antiquity to the new thing. Set most popularly to an old tune, “The Maids of Mourne Shore,” “Down by the Salley Gardens” has long been and remains a repertoire standard for singers. It is both like and unlike every traditional ballad that begins with a lovers’ meeting and ends in murder. Yet “Down by the Salley Gardens,” in two trimeter octets, does not end in murder, only tears.