As such, the poet’s beloved embodies all that is pure, natural, and free, counselling her impatient lover to take his time and let life happen. She is identified with nature through the (mirrored) third lines of both stanzas: ‘She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree’ and ‘She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs’. The lover is delicate and pure, with ‘little snow-white feet’ and a ‘snow-white hand’. The implication is that he was too serious, too headstrong, too quick to fall in love and get caught up in the midst of things. This broadens out into ‘weirs’ and ‘tears’ in the second stanza, but the continuation between first and second stanza reinforces the regret the present speaker feels for his younger, hot-headed actions. In the first stanza, there’s no wiggle-room: both pairs of rhymes are tightly clustered around the long ‘e’ vowel sound, as we get ‘meet’, ‘feet’, ‘tree’, and ‘agree’. Both men had great respect and affection for her, so it. The song is dedicated the Australian-born soprano Clytie Mundy, Pears’ singing teacher during much of his and Britten’s time in the USA. Yeats tells this little story of regret in quatrains comprising two pairs of rhyming couplets. The ‘Salley (or willow) Gardens’ of the title is the setting for the singer’s recollection of a lost love.
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