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.
5 In a field by the river my love and I did stand, And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand. She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;? dams But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.
1889
The Rose of the World1
Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream? For these red lips, with all their mournful pride, Mournful that no new wonder may betide, Troy2 passed away in one high funeral gleam,
5 And Usna's children died.3
We and the labouring world are passing by: Amid men's souls, that waver and give place Like the pale waters in their wintry race, Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
10 Lives on this lonely face.
Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode: Before you were, or any hearts to beat, Weary and kind one lingered by His seat; He made the world to be a grassy road
15 Before her wandering feet.
1892,1895
1. Originally titled 'An Old Song Resung,' with Yeats's footnote: 'This is an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballysodare, Sligo, who often sings them to herself.' 'Salley': a variant of sallow, a species of willow tree. 1. The Platonic idea of eternal beauty. 'I notice upon reading these poems for the first time for several years that the quality symbolized as The Rose differs from the Intellectual Beauty of Shelley and of Spenser in that I have imagined it as suffering with man and not as something pursued and seen from afar' [Yeats, in 1925]. Yeats wrote this poem to Maud Gonne.
2. Ancient city destroyed by the Greeks, according to legend, after the abduction of the beautiful Helen. 3. In Old Irish legend the Ulster warrior Naiose, son of Usna or Usnach (pronounced Uskna) carried off the beautiful Deirdre, whom King Conchubar of Ulster had intended to marry, and with his two brothers took her to Scotland. Eventually Conchubar lured the four of them back to Ireland and killed the three brothers.
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THE SORROW OF LOVE / 2025
The Lake Isle of Innisfree1
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles2 made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
5 And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
10 I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core.
1890 1890,1892
The Sorrow of Love1
The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves, The brilliant moon and all the milky sky, And all that famous harmony of leaves, Had blotted out man's image and his cry.
5 A girl arose that had red mournful lips And seemed the greatness of the world in tears, Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships And proud as Priam murdered with his peers;2
Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves,
10 A climbing moon upon an empty sky, And all that lamentation of the leaves, Could but compose man's image and his cry.
1891 1892,1925
1. Inis Fraoigh (Heather Island) is a small island in Lough Gill, near Sligo, in the west of Ireland. In his autobiography Yeats writes: 'I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree . . . and when walking through Fleet Street [in London] very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.'
2. Stakes interwoven with twigs or branches. 1. For earlier versions of this poem, see 'Poems in Process,' in the appendices to this volume. 2. Odysseus (whom the Romans called Ulysses) is the hero of Homers Odyssey, which describes how, after having fought in the siege of Troy, he wandered for ten years before reaching his home, the Greek island of Ithaca. Priam was king of Troy at the time of the siege and was killed when the Greeks captured the city.
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2026 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
When You Are Old1
When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
5 How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
