Down by the Salley Gardens Analysis

Ballads are everywhere in popular music. Think slow, moving, and emotionally powerful numbers, like this one. (There's even a subgenre of power ballads, like this one). In poetry, a ballad is simpl...

Our speaker sounds a bit nostalgic and reminiscent over his youthful and foolish days of refusing to take good advice in "Down by the Salley Gardens." So we know for sure that he's using a retrospe...

At first we might think we're in a Disney story with Snow White and her dwarfs, but then we realize the speaker is just using some common romantic imagery in the setting to keep with the tradition...

"Down by the Salley Gardens" sounds like a good Irish folk song because, well, it was inspired by one. So Yeats wasn't trying to make his rendition sound too different in terms of its sonic qualiti...

We're not quite sure where "the salley gardens" is located, but we do know that willow ("salley") trees are pretty popular in Ireland. Yeats also wrote a lot about Ireland, so it's likely that he h...

You'd be hard pressed to find a person in Ireland who doesn't know about William Butler Yeats. Likewise, you'd be hard pressed to find a Yeats poem that isn't about Ireland in some way. So if you f...

Popular songs like the one this poem is based on aren't usually all that profound in terms of their underlying themes, so "Down by the Salley Gardens" keeps things simple for us, no matter how comp...

Did you know Yeats's poem was originally inspired by the song, "You Rambling Boys of Pleasure"? (Source.)Yeats loved Irish folklore, too, some of which probably inspired the imagery behind our favo...

"Down by the Salley Gardens" is about love, but it's the kind of young love that's not exactly the sort of thing Miley Cyrus would twerk about. So things are looking relatively tame here, and we th...