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. But I being young and foolish, with my darling did not agree.' I took her in my arms and to her I gave kisses sweet She bade me take life easy just as the leaves fall from the tree. 'Down by yon flowery garden my love and I we first did meet. 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: ' 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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