Down by the Salley Gardens (SATB)

Description

The salley gardens are thought to be on the banks of the river at Ballysadare, near Sligo. ‘Salley’ are young willow branches, grown as material to thatch roofs. This poem of young and lost love is a direct imitation of a traditional Irish song. Yeats noted that the poem was ‘an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman (…) who often sings them to herself’.  In this arrangement, we hear the direct speech of the lover in the background vocals, and their commands to ‘take love easy’ and ‘take life easy’.